


ships that pass in the night

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Watcher Entertainment
Genre: Accidental sex tape, Excessive Ocean's Eleven References, Friends With Benefits, Heist of Accidental Sex Tape, M/M, Men Being Buffoons Instead of Communicating, Sharing a Bed, Upping the Ante Sexually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 18:48:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23841238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: The more Ryan thinks about it, the more he thinks he just needs to return the favor, that’s all. And then it’ll be done, like it was meant to be done weeks ago, and they can both move on for real.It’s not that hewantsto. It’s that he won’t be able to stop thinking about it until he evens the score. He has to restore balance to the Force or order to the universe, or—or whatever. It’s a karma thing.“I think you have to let me jerk you off,” Ryan tells Shane one night. They’re working late, alone in the Watcher office, one of many such late nights these days.“Wh—here?” Shane asks. He looks around, baffled, like he’ll have been magically transported somewhere else. “Haveto?” And then: “Letyou?”Or: A middle-of-the night rendezvous; a series of escalating dares; a lazy river; a heist; a do-over.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 188
Kudos: 824





	ships that pass in the night

**Author's Note:**

> As the summary must surely make clear, the author is still not entirely certain what this work is about. Nevertheless, she hopes it brings you joy in these trying times. 
> 
> Thanks to Catt for the beta! “This isn’t where I parked my car” is a line from the seminal classic film Eurotrip (2004). “Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidante” is of course from the lyrics to the theme song for The Golden Girls.

*

Ryan’s having a dream.

It’s a good dream.

He’s in bed with someone, but he can’t seem to make out who she is, even once he realizes he’s dreaming and tries to focus. The _feel_ of her, close and warm, breath hot on his neck, hands on his lower back and hip to keep him in place against her, is all he has room for. Her smell is familiar, comforting, and he inhales deep to try to place it.

The pressure is just right, the motion delicious, and Ryan rides it like waves on the ocean. He can feel the crest of an orgasm building. He lets his hands drift up to wind in her hair—but it’s short, shorter than he expected, and the body under him is _so_ big, all-encompassing.

He shudders as he gets close, and his partner encourages him on.

“Ryan,” she says—no, _he_ says, it’s a deeper voice, which, okay, whatever, dreams gonna dream— “Ryan,” and Ryan doesn’t even care, he’s so close, it’s so good—

*

“_Ryan_,” the voice says again, and Ryan slides regretfully into wakefulness. 

Still half asleep, so very close to coming in his dream, it takes Ryan an agonizing moment to piece together where he is.

He’s pressed close to someone, chest to hip to thigh—half on top of them, really. Before he can control his body, he grinds against them again, feeling them shift in response. He’s _so_ hard.

There’s a heavy sigh. A hand lands on his side, stilling him, tapping urgently at the bare skin where his t-shirt’s rucked up. “Ryan, man, hey. You need to wake up.”

Then it clicks. Ryan’s in a bedroom in a haunted bed and breakfast in upstate Oregon, built on the bones of an old resort and hot spring. It must be the middle of the night, because there’s no peek of light coming in around the edges of the curtains.

He is, technically, at work. The person in this too-small bed with him is Shane. The bony hips pressed against his own are Shane’s. The erection fitted against his thigh—because surely that’s what that is, it couldn’t be anything else—is _Shane’s_.

His stomach, still roiling with want, turns over anew with embarrassment.

He should roll away. Instead he freezes, allowing these realizations to wash over him one by one, holding him fast in a cloud of awkwardness. He would have expected the sheer existential panic to overwhelm his desire, to kill whatever dream-enhanced arousal persists, but it doesn’t. So instead he lies there and fights the urge to grind down against a warm body.

“This isn’t where I parked my car,” he mumbles, and Shane wheezes out a sympathetic little laugh. If Ryan craned his neck he could see Shane’s face, but he’s not sure he wants to. Instead he just stays face-planted in Shane’s chest.

“No,” Shane agrees. “No, I think it isn’t.”

Ryan must not be fully awake yet, because it’s all so hazy and unreal. Shane’s hand is still on his bare hip, warm and sturdy. Before he can help himself he stutters against Shane again, a full-bodied shiver going up his back to make him rock ungracefully down.

It’s humiliating, but Ryan cannot make himself move. He’s too warm. He’s too afraid. It’s too—he’s too hard, the dream’s still spilling through every crack of his brain like it was real. He’d have come in just another minute, if Shane hadn’t woken him, and even now he sort of wants to.

“Okay, well,” Shane says, and his voice is a low, sleepy rumble that says he’s not all the way awake yet, either. “I could—if you want.”

His hand twitches on Ryan’s hip, creeps along his side, and even through the web of exhaustion Ryan understands what he’s offering. He does not understand _why_, exactly, but it still feels like his dream. Maybe Shane feels it too, the way the room is shimmering around them, the way that consequences feel slippery and toothless.

“Mmm,” Ryan hums, an uncertain, noncommittal sound. He tilts his hips down again, testing.

It’s been so long since he shared a bed with someone like this. It’s been so long since someone touched him. Between starting Watcher and filming for Unsolved, Ryan’s had less than no time to date. He hadn’t realized until this very moment how much he’s missed the warmth of another person under him.

It doesn’t even matter that it’s Shane. Or maybe it _does_ matter, something in his brain flickers in warning. Maybe it matters the _most_. Either way, Ryan’s too far gone to care. He chances a quick look up at Shane’s face. It’s hard to see him in the dark of the room, but his eyes are heavy-lidded with sleep, his expression serious.

“I need my marching orders,” Shane says, slow and slurry and cautious. His hand is between their bodies now, on Ryan’s thigh, pulling his boxers askew.

“Yeah, okay,” Ryan says, inarticulate as he mentally traces the path of that hand up to where he wants it. “Yeah. Yes.”

And then Shane cups the length of him through his boxers, encompassing him completely, and god, his hand is _huge_. Ryan bucks up into his touch with a stifled groan and knows it will take no time at all to finish the job his dream started.

That would be enough, probably—a dozen strokes through the thin material might do it, Ryan’s so keyed up—but Shane slides his hand into Ryan’s boxers and wraps around Ryan skin-to-skin.

Ryan almost sobs at how good it feels, finally getting direct pressure after god only knows how long spent futilely grinding his way to coming. He’s wet and leaking, has been since before he woke, and Shane’s hand slides easily along his length and around d the head to gather slickness.

Despite the awkward angle, despite the bigness of his hand working in a small space, Shane manages just fine. He plays around for a minute, getting the feel of it, but then he goes hard and steady until Ryan clutches at him in warning.

“Gonna,” Ryan grits out, and then it’s Shane’s turn to press an inarticulate noise into the hot skin of his bare shoulder. He goes faster and sloppier, his other hand pinning Ryan still with fingertips fit to bruise. When Ryan comes it hits him like a freight train, so hard he sees little floaters behind his eyelids, so shocking that he kicks out with his foot and catches Shane on the shin.

Shane hisses at the impact, but he doesn’t let up until Ryan’s twitching from overstimulation, breathing hard through his disbelief and shuddering away from the contact.

And then Shane is wiping his hand off, saying something to him, but Ryan doesn’t catch it. He’s already most of the way back to sleep, easily lured in by the profound strangeness of it. As if he was never fully awake at all.

*

Ryan wakes up again many hours later to an empty room.

The other side of the bed is so _very_ empty that it’s recriminating in its emptiness, so empty his eyes skate guiltily over the prim paisley duvet. The room is dead quiet, except—if he holds his breath—the tick of Shane’s watch on the nightstand.

A look at his phone shows that it’s almost ten in the morning, which means that Shane and the crew are probably enjoying the _breakfast_ part of bed and breakfast, and that Ryan’s missed his shot at his. He takes a long, hot shower instead, washing the stickiness from his belly and trying not to catastrophize.

He examines himself in the mirror. There are three little purple shadows on his hip, the already-fading memories of fingertips.

When he comes out, dressed and ready for whatever misery the day has to offer, he notices the camera set up across from the bed. It’s standard, on the rare occasions they sleep over at a haunted location, to leave the camera running overnight and see if they catch anything ghosty.

Of course, last night the camera will have caught a lot more than that.

“Fuck,” Ryan spits out. The camera’s off now, no telltale red light showing a recording in progress, but he’s sure they turned it on the night before. He opens it up to check for a tape, but it’s empty. Shane must have already destroyed the evidence.

Ryan hopes he tossed it in the hot spring. 

At about 10:30 there’s the grind and turn of a key in the lock. Ryan has a flurry of panic where he’s not sure what to do, where to sit, where to look. In the end he throws himself back on the bed and tosses his arm over his eyes to buy himself more time.

Then there’s a nice long moment of weighty silence where he can feel Shane standing at the end of the bed looking at him. Neither of them says anything for too long. It isn’t natural. Ryan can’t stand an uncomfortable silence.

“How was breakfast?”

“Really weird,” Shane says after another considering moment. “B&Bs are weird. There’s this couple here for birdwatching, so they went on and on about the great-tailed grackle for like forty minutes while the rest of us pretended to care. That’s a bird, by the way. I know all about them now.”

“Grackle,” Ryan repeats, because it doesn’t even sound like a real word, let alone a real bird.

“Anyway, food was good. I brought you some.”

The promise of food, and something to do with his hands, makes Ryan sit up at last. There’s a plate at the end of the bed, loaded up with a couple of pastries and some fruit.

And that’s something, right? Shane wouldn’t have brought up food if he was angry.

Ryan starts to tear into a croissant. Shane busies himself with packing up his suitcase and starting to put away the camera, and it’s easier to talk when they’re not looking at each other, when they have something to keep their hands busy.

“Don’t forget your watch,” Ryan says, nodding at it.

Shane rubs his naked wrist, long fingers encircling it in surprise like he hadn’t even noticed he forgot it in the first place. Ryan imagines him getting dressed in the dark, slipping out as quietly as possible so as to put off this very conversation. Probably his socks don’t match either.

“Oh, right. Thanks.” Shane walks over to the dresser, turning his back on Ryan as he slips the watch over his wrist.

“And—the, uh. The tape,” he starts. He doesn’t miss the way Shane’s shoulders tense up, or the pause he takes to finish fastening his watch before he speaks.

“Gone. I took care of it. I’ll just tell the editors the overnight footage got corrupted.”

“Thanks,” Ryan says. He finishes chewing his mouthful of pastry. “So—are you—”

Shane sighs. He turns around. “It’s fine, Ryan. It’s. We don’t have to talk about it, okay? It can be like it never happened.”

But that doesn’t feel quite right to Ryan either. He feels like they should say _something_, find some way to acknowledge this weird thing that happened between them, even if they never bring it up again outside this room. At the very least he should apologize for his rudeness, because what kind of jerk falls asleep literally seconds after a hand job without so much as a thank you? That’s not—Ryan wouldn’t, not usually, and he feels like a grade-A creep for doing so even in his half-asleep fog.

“I just feel like,” Ryan says, and then he peters out, because he’s not sure _what_ he feels like. “I’m sorry.”

“You feel like you’re sorry?” Shane asks, and something about his tone makes it sound different, not what Ryan meant at all. He says it like he thinks Ryan means _regretful_, when what he actually means is _guilty_.

“No, yeah, I just,” Ryan stammers, and he makes himself take a deep breath and try harder. This is _Shane_. He owns a company with this guy. There’s no aspect of his life that doesn’t depend on the strength of this relationship, which means he owes it to everyone to give it his best shot. “I’m sorry I fell back asleep. We should have—talked, I should have…”

Ryan doesn’t know what he should have done. Reciprocated, maybe. That would have been the polite thing to do. Or rolled away in the first place and let this remain an _almost-thing_, something to laugh about in the morning and wonder about ever after.

Shane heads back to their bags to finish packing. “You don’t have to be sorry,” he says, head down, attending to various pockets and zips, brisk and businesslike. “I’m not sure you were really awake in the first place. I’m surprised you even remember it.”

“I remember,” Ryan says. “I mean, it’s hazy, but, you know. Memorable.”

“I shouldn’t have. You were asleep, you were mumbling, you didn’t know what you were saying. I’m the one who should be apologizing to you.”

“That’s not true,” Ryan says, and he feels marginally hurt by the implication even though it would let him off the hook. He just knows that’s not how it was, and he needs Shane to know it too. He can feel his own face reddening as he says, “I knew exactly what you were offering.”

Maybe, Ryan thinks, he could throw _himself_ in the hot spring. Being boiled alive would be unpleasant, but surely no worse than this.

Shane’s face is pink too. He closes up the camera bag with a finite _zip_. “Well, okay then. We’re both sorry, and we’re both forgiven, and the tape’s gone. So that’s that, and no hard feelings.”

The words _hard feelings_ hang between them, a joke demanding to be made. Any other time one of them would have made it, but Ryan’s not sure if it’s too soon.

He can’t help it, though. He snickers.

And then Shane snickers too, into his forearm.

“No hard feelings,” Ryan repeats through giggles. “Well, not_ now_.”

“Speak for yourself,” Shane says, and then they’re both laughing, and the awkwardness between them recedes to a level Ryan would qualify as bearable.

He thinks, _this I can do_. He can blunder through the discomfort just like he blundered into this thing in the first place, and they can put it behind them. As if, like Shane said, it never happened at all.

*

The thing is that while Ryan is an expert blunderer, he’s not particularly good at letting things lie _or_ putting things anywhere in the general direction of behind him. He is, however, _excellent_ at worrying.

So they go back to L.A., and they make their excuses to Buzzfeed about the missing tape, and Ryan agonizes.

What bothers him the most, he eventually concludes, is the unevenness of it. When he fell asleep and left Shane in the middle of the night to take care of himself, to work through whatever he was feeling about it alone, Ryan took the coward’s way out. Now it’s just hanging there between them, unfinished, and like all unfinished things it demands its ending—happy or otherwise. 

The more Ryan thinks about it, the more he thinks he just needs to return the favor, that’s all. And then it’ll be done, like it was meant to be done weeks ago, and they can both move on for real.

It’s not that he _wants_ to. It’s that he thinks he won’t be able to stop thinking about it until he evens the score. He has to restore balance to the Force or order to the universe, or—or whatever. It’s a karma thing.

“I think you have to let me jerk you off,” Ryan tells Shane one night. They’re working late, alone in the Watcher office, one of many such late nights these days.

“Wh—_here_?” Shane asks. He looks around, baffled, like he’ll have been magically transported somewhere else where that sentence makes sense. “_Have_ to?”

And then: “_Let_ you?”

“No, not here,” Ryan snaps. He’s aware he sounds ridiculous. He’s annoyed he has to bring this up at all, but he does. “I mean. Wherever. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter where.”

“I think we should ask Steven if it matters where,” Shane says. “Seriously, what the fuck has gotten into you?”

“It’s stupid,” Ryan says, because it _is_ stupid. It’s so stupid. “It’s just—you know. You did me a favor, and I didn’t, like, _reciprocate_, and I feel weird about it.”

“You feel weird about it? But you don’t feel weird about this conversation?”

“I feel weird about all of it!” Ryan’s voice is a little shrill.

Shane sighs. He sits back from his desk, crossing his legs and arms, the very picture of disdain. “I really thought we were done with this. I thought we agreed—”

“Well, so did I.”

“Then, and I mean this sincerely, _what the fuck_?”

“I just feel like I owe you, dude,” Ryan says. Then he winces, because that doesn’t exactly sound nice. Shane seizes on it immediately, as Ryan knew he would.

“Oh, well if you _owe_ me,” Shane says. “Who doesn’t want a nice obligation handie? Nothing gets me erect quite like people forcing themselves to sleep with me out of a lingering sense of guilt and unease.”

“Ugh, don’t call it that. That’s not what I meant. I just mean I’m not that guy, okay? I’m not that shitty bro who—”

“Oh, you’re not that _guy_—”

“Just let me finish!”

“I think the only reason we’re still talking about this is that you _did_ finish,” Shane says archly. “And if I’d known you’d get so weird about it I wouldn’t have given you a hand in the first place. It was just—it wasn’t a big deal, Ryan.”

Ryan just stares at him, because honestly, there’s no chance Shane didn’t know perfectly well he’d get weird about it. Even freshly roused from sleep at three in the morning, there’s no way Shane didn’t know. Whatever he’d been thinking that night, he’d weighed the consequences and decided to do it anyway.

“It doesn’t feel _done_ to me,” he says. “I keep thinking about it, and I think if I could—if I could finish what we, what you, what _we_ started, I could move on. But as it is I feel guilty, and rude, and—and—childish. It’s all off-kilter, so you should just let me make us even so the universe will get off my fucking back about it, okay?”

He’s a little embarrassed about the rush of nonsense, but Shane is quiet for a long time. He seems to be really contemplating.

“What if I don’t want you to? What if I just want you to buy me a beer and repress this for years like a normal person?”

“Well, I’m not gonna make you, obviously,” Ryan says, his ego a little stung. “But you wanted me to that night. I could tell. I’m not stupid, Shane.”

Shane throws his head back to stare at the ceiling. He spins around in his desk chair a couple of times. Ryan wants to push, but he knows he has to leave it. He’s said his piece, and that’s all he can do.

Probably an hour later, Shane shuts his computer down. He gathers up his things. He pushes his chair in, steps away from his desk, and then looks back at Ryan.

“Are you coming or not?”

“What, _now_?”

Ryan starts to internally panic. He thought he’d have more time to prepare, is all. Doing something in theory, rehearsing it in your head, is not the same as doing it in practice. Even if he only ever gives one dude one hand job in his whole life, he still doesn’t want it to be a _bad_ hand job.

He must not be concealing his thoughts very well, because Shane rolls his eyes. “It’s not a test you have to study for, man. Let’s just get this over with.”

“Exactly what a guy wants to hear,” Ryan says, but he scrambles for his bag anyway, making the split-second decision to go with it.

“_And_ you’re paying for takeout after.”

They turn off the lights and they leave together.

*

“Business or pleasure?” Shane asks about five seconds after they walk into his apartment. He kicks his shoes off and tosses his bag down, like tonight’s just another normal night.

“What?”

“You’re the one who brought this up. Surely you have _some_ kind of plan. Did you want to just get down to business, or did you want to hang out first?”

“Do I look like a man with a plan to you?” Ryan asks, stepping out of his own sneaks. 

Shane’s apartment’s always been a no-shoes-on-the-hardwoods place, but today Ryan looks down at his socked feet like they belong to someone else. It’s weird to leave his shoes on the floor and wonder, for the very first time, what other items of clothing might join them.

“You most certainly do not,” Shane concedes, after a generous pause that Ryan assumes is for the sake of politeness only. He heads for his fridge. “Beer?”

“Yes please.”

Ryan doesn’t want to get drunk, but he wouldn’t mind taking the edge off. There’s no point trying to hide his nerves; Shane knows him far too well for that. But that doesn’t mean he can’t tamp them down a little.

He has this uneasy feeling that Shane is playing chicken with him, like Shane thinks when push comes to shove Ryan won’t go through with it. He keeps calling bluffs that aren’t actually bluffs, and Ryan doesn’t know how to convince him he’s serious short of just doing the thing.

Shane sits himself on his couch and flips through channels on his TV until he finds ESPN. He pats the cushion next to him and Ryan goes.

Shane tosses an arm around his shoulders, and Ryan only barely resists the urge to duck out from under it and wiggle away.

“What are you doing?”

“Dunno. Setting the mood, I guess. I assumed the sportsball would get you going. Is this not the sort of thing you usually do when you want your lady friend to stick her hand down your pants?”

Well, when he puts it like that.

“I’m not your lady friend.”

“You’re my gentleman friend,” Shane says.

“I’m your _friend_ friend.”

“You give handies to all your friends?”

“Just the ones who give them to me first,” Ryan says pointedly, which makes Shane shut up in a hurry. “And don’t say fucking _handies_. Jesus.”

It’s really not a big deal, Ryan reminds himself. Hand stuff is the least sex a thing can be and still technically be sex. This is college kid shit, really, and just because he personally never got around to it in college doesn’t change that.

Anyway, not to get competitive, but surely if Shane can do it Ryan can do it too. It can’t be that h—_difficult_. It can’t be that difficult.

He reaches for Shane’s belt buckle, tentative, and he barely gets it undone before Shane is laughing and squirming away. Ryan can feel Shane’s stomach moving as he laughs.

“Are you gonna let me do this or what?” Ryan asks, shaking out his tremoring hand, and Shane laughs harder.

“I’m still not sure,” Shane admits. He passes his hand over his face, trying to chase his smile away, trying to make himself be serious. “Oh, man. I’m sorry. It’s not funny. Okay. Okay.”

“Take your own pants off, then,” Ryan says, a little annoyed. Shane shrugs and stands to take his pants off, like he thinks the whole thing is ludicrous but also like he’s used to gamely going along with Ryan’s ludicrous ideas.

He kicks his pants off to the side and sits down, looking silly in his boxer briefs and his collared button-down.

Ryan cracks his knuckles. Shane raises his eyebrows at him.

“Again, I just want to point out for the record that I did not ask for this, nor did I expect it, nor did I necessarily want it. We are here for no other reason than because you are a weirdo with so many complexes even I cannot predict them all, and if you want to back out—”

“I don’t want to back out!” Ryan snaps, because he _doesn’t_, and then he presses his hand to the front of Shane’s underwear to prove it.

“Hmm,” Shane says.

“_Hmm_,” Ryan says.

He has this moment of sheer terror where he thinks Shane’s not even going to get hard, and Ryan’s just going to be sitting here fondling a guy who decidedly doesn’t want to be fondled until they both crumble into ash from humiliation and regret. Then he slides his hand along the front of Shane’s underwear and squeezes carefully, and he feels Shane twitch and start to grow under his hand.

That twitch makes Ryan startle, makes him jump and fling his hand away like someone snuck up behind him and whispered _boo_, and Shane snorts.

But Ryan’s not about to just let the guy be _right_, so he touches again, and again, and then when Shane’s breath hitches gratifyingly, Ryan traces the hardening line of him through the fabric with the tips of his fingers.

It’s different than getting a girl going, but it’s not, like, offensive. The response is more immediate, the technique—or in this case the fretfully obvious absence of it—seems to matter not at all. There’s a certain intuitive logic to it, because Ryan knows where and how he likes to be touched.

His thumb finds the head of Shane’s dick and rubs just under it. He rubs until a little wet spot appears on the fabric of Shane’s underwear, until Shane’s hips jerk up and his hand lands on the back of Ryan’s neck. Ryan kind of likes that.

“You’re killing me, smalls,” Shane tells him, his voice low and different, and Ryan likes that too. 

He notices, somewhat abstractly, that he’s half-hard in his own pants. It might be some kind of sympathetic response, but then again, it might not.

“Help me get these off, then,” Ryan says. His hands find the waistband of Shane’s underwear to peel them down and off, and Shane tosses them to the side to join his pants. “Do you have, like—”

“Table by my bed,” Shane says. “Top drawer.”

Because it seems rude to make an entirely pantsless man walk down his own hallway like Winnie the Pooh with a boner, Ryan goes to get the lube himself. Everybody’s got a top drawer by the bed, and Shane’s contains his lube, and also condoms and a couple of toys Ryan makes a mental note to ask about later. There are also assorted private sundries: a few folded-up miscellaneous papers Ryan doesn’t open, a flash drive he assumes is for porn, and a little camcorder tape.

Ryan picks up the tape and turns it over, curious. It’s labeled _Hot Lake Hotel 6.2.20 Tape 5 _in TJ’s chicken-scratch scrawl_, _and it’s definitely the tape Shane had told Ryan he’d destroyed. Ryan’s got thoughts about that, a lot of them, all half-formed and running about five hundred miles an hour. They’re going to have to wait.

He slips the tape back in the drawer and grabs the lube.

When he comes back out to the living room, Shane’s got a hand on himself. Ryan bats him away, even though he could have watched for a little longer.

“Hey, cut it out.”

“Well, you took too long,” Shane says. “It’s rude to get a guy hard and then just wander off.”

“Buddy, you haven’t _seen_ rude,” Ryan says, and Shane opens his mouth to reply, but then Ryan squirts some lube into his palm and wraps his hand around Shane’s dick before he can chicken out. He doesn’t bother to warm it up first, as punishment for the attitude, and the way Shane tries to simultaneously cringe away from and press into Ryan’s touch is such a perfect summation of their friendship that Ryan has to grin.

He doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it’s not that different than getting himself off, after all. Shane’s uncut, and that’s different but not distractingly so. He’s more sensitive than Ryan thought, maybe because of it, and it’s oddly satisfying to feel him grow to full hardness under his slick hand. Shane’s head is thrown back against the back of the couch, his eyes to the ceiling, and when Ryan changes his grip a bead of sweat rolls off Shane’s forehead and down like in some cartoon.

In a detached sort of way Ryan can tell that he’s enjoying himself more than he expected to, although he’s still not sure if it’s in spite of Shane or because of him. He should probably figure that out eventually.

For now all he knows is that at some point it stops feeling like half a joke.

At some point, he makes the conscious decision to stop being detached, outside his own body looking in, and just be _in_.

Probably that point is when Shane says “_Ryan_,” choked-off and desperate, like Ryan’s never heard him say it before. He’s got his hand on Ryan’s shoulder, clinging tightly as if it’s the only place he considers safe territory, and Ryan suddenly feels like it isn’t enough. Like he’d rather they were touching more, but less safely.

He feels, suddenly, like the person Shane is talking to when he says his name like that: _Ryan_. _Fuck, Ryan, that’s—_

He throws his leg over Shane, knees on either side of him on the couch, distributing his weight so he’s sitting far back enough on Shane’s thighs to give himself room to work. Luckily Shane’s got a lot of thigh, so it’s a big perch. Ryan doesn’t know a lot about it, but he suspects this is the sort of dick that deserves two hands, and from here he can reach between them to wrap one hand around the head while the other moves on the shaft. It’s nothing fancy but it’s better in all ways, pressure on Ryan’s own dick when he leans in, Shane’s hands falling to his waist to keep him steady.

Shane _groans_, a shocking, loud sound ripped right out of his throat. His hips arch off the couch, bringing Ryan with them like he’s riding a bucking bronco, and Ryan laughs even as he ducks his forehead into Shane’s shoulder to brace himself.

“You’re gonna get come on your jeans, doing that,” Shane says quietly. His face and neck are flushed red, disappearing down under the collar of his shirt in splotches like a heat rash. His eyes are bright, wild, like Ryan’s only seen them when Shane has a fever.

“It’s probably time to wash them anyway, it’s been weeks,” Ryan says, and Shane snickers.

“You’re foul.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Ryan says. It’s flirty, but there’s no harm in it. Surely any harm has already been done. They rounded the corner on _harm_ three weeks ago, under an ugly paisley duvet in an ugly floral-wallpapered room in the middle of the night, and now they’re doing an extra lap because Ryan’s an idiot who doesn’t know when to say uncle.

“Might as well just toss them, they’re basically rags,” Shane says.

One of Shane’s hands leaves Ryan’s waist to find the gaping hole at the knee of his jeans and weasel its way in. There’s no reason for it, but the feel of Shane’s hand on the curve of his bare kneecap, his fingers tucked under the ripped denim to touch the underside of his knee and the first few inches of the back of his thigh, makes Ryan shiver and shift in Shane’s lap.

“You’re getting off on this,” Shane says, and he isn’t wrong. He’s just in a very precarious position to be calling someone out, is all. The absolute _glassest_ of houses.

“Shut up and come already, big guy,” Ryan says, not bothering to deny it. “I’m gonna get a cramp. Gonna submit a worker’s comp claim to Steven for my repetitive stress injury.”

There’s a little flash of something in Shane’s eyes, excitement maybe, or joy, and he tremors minutely under Ryan’s hands, and Ryan realizes he likes the banter almost as much as he likes someone touching his cock.

Ryan wonders if it’s been foreplay this whole time, and he just didn’t know it.

That raises more questions than it answers, but there’s no time for it just now. Shane’s shifting under him relentlessly, like Ryan’s hands on him are too much and not enough all at once, and Ryan knows what that means.

“You close?” he asks, and Shane grunts and nods and meets his eye again, finally.

“Yeah,” Shane breathes. His hands find either side of Ryan’s neck and drag him down, drag him in, close—so close Ryan can feel the breath on his ear, like in his dream. “Call it a habit, but I have this weird urge to kiss you,” he says, and as soon as the idea’s in Ryan’s head he has to try that too.

He leans in the rest of the way, the barest inch or two, fitting his mouth over Shane’s. It’s too much happening all at once, remembering to keep his hands moving, trying to remember how you _kiss_ someone—what even _is_ kissing?—and trying to ignore his own body’s urge to move.

Shane’s mouth tastes like beer, hoppy and citrusy and not yet stale, and he holds onto either side of Ryan’s neck for dear life, biting his lower lip and running his tongue along Ryan’s like he could memorize it. _Oh, right, that’s how_, Ryan remembers, and then—

And then there’s warmth on his hands, wetness, and Shane is breaking off the kiss to pant hotly into his mouth as he comes. He presses his slack mouth to the vulnerable skin of Ryan’s throat and lets Ryan work him through it.

“_Ryan_,” he says again in that new way, and then his hand is making its way to the fly of Ryan’s jeans, and Ryan should really protest. This isn’t why they’re here.

He should stop this, before—

Well, he should say something, is all.

*

Later, lying back on Shane’s couch in a clean pair of Shane’s sweats, way too long in the leg, Ryan sighs.

“What’s up?” Shane asks from his spot on the floor near Ryan’s feet. “Want another beer?”

“No,” Ryan says, although he kind of does. “It’s just—”

“What?”

“It’s just that the point of this was to make it even, and now we’re not even. Again.”

Shane snickers. “Whoops. I guess you’re right. Sorry.”

But he doesn’t _sound_ sorry.

And right at this moment, sated and thrumming inside with a newfound, electric curiosity, Ryan isn’t particularly sorry either.

“Guess you’re in debt again, buddy,” Shane says, and the cautious slyness in his voice gives Ryan goosebumps.

*

Bergaras are like Lannisters, except less murdery, less incesty, and none of them are blond.

Really they’re nothing like Lannisters, except in one regard: they always pay their debts.

Ryan gets him back in the bathroom of one of their favorite bars, six drinks in, Shane pressed up against the stall door, one of Ryan’s hands over his mouth while the other works in his inconveniently tight pants. Their friends are outside, their coworkers. Anyone could put two and two together and get four.

Guys come and go, a murmur of voices and laughter, the sounds of people pissing, the running of sinks. Ryan goes up on his toes to give Shane a bruising kiss to keep him quiet instead, thinking it should be a lot grosser than it is, that he should be less into this.

He feels like someone else. It feels like someone else’s life.

Maybe having sex with inappropriate people in inappropriate places is the one other thing Bergaras and Lannisters have in common.

*

They’re even for a while, and things could almost pass for normal.

They joke and they tease and they flirt a little, maybe, but not so Steven would notice. Sometimes Ryan thinks it’s just that it isn’t so different from how it was before.

Mostly they work. Their pre-recorded pilot seasons for Watcher run out midsummer, which means it’s back to writing and filming new content. There’s something about the energy in the office this summer that’s really good for creativity. Ryan feels _on_ like he hasn’t felt on in a while.

Everything he and Shane make together that summer is sharp and funny and energetic, even more than usual, and Ryan tries not to read anything into that. He tries not to read into how effortless it feels.

They’re back at Buzzfeed, too, looking at cuts of the upcoming season of Supernatural, recording VO, filming the intros and outros to episodes. Ryan likes it here so much more now that he doesn’t have to _be here_; now that he and Shane can flit in, have a laugh with old colleagues, and then leave before the bad taste hits his mouth.

They’re recording VO at Buzzfeed HQ, late in the evening, because they’re fitting it in around a full workday at Watcher. There are always people here late, working longer than they should to hit this unreasonable deadline or that one, but it’s quiet in the studio wing, where the makeshift sound booths are.

They’re doing VO for the Hot Springs Hotel episode tonight, and maybe it’s got Shane feeling nostalgic. Maybe he’s _remembering_. He keeps looking at Ryan out of the corner of his eye and then glancing away again when he’s caught.

He keeps smiling these small, private smiles that make Ryan’s palms sweat.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Ryan says. “Stop _grinning_.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yeah you do, asshole. You’re looking at me like you’ve seen me naked.”

Shane leans back against the table, casual as you please. He turns the camera off, like this whole time he was just waiting for his cue. “But I _have _seen you naked.”

“That’s not—turn that back on,” Ryan says, nodding at the camera. His face feels hot. It’s a thousand degrees in this booth.

“No.”

“What, you don’t want another tape for your growing collection?”

It’s a low blow, and the smile freezes on Shane’s face. He looks down at the ground, then back at the door, and Ryan immediately feels like shit for playing that card now. He’s been saving it, but not necessarily for this.

He shuts off the audio equipment. Whatever direction this conversation goes, he doesn’t want there to be a record of it floating around Buzzfeed’s servers for the rest of time.

“You know about that, huh?” Shane asks finally, breaking the silence.

Ryan thinks about saying something really mysterious and enigmatic and cool, like, _I know everything, Shane. _He dismisses it, fully aware he can’t pull it off. Shane knows him too well.

“Have you watched it?”

“Yeah,” Shane admits. “It’s—night, you can’t really see much. And, you know. Covers.”

“Can I see it, if I want?”

Shane crosses his arms over his chest. “Of course you can. You’ve got as much of a right as me, but there’s nothing to see anyway. It’s just a lot of dark and some muffled noises and, believe it or not, nary one single solitary ghost.”

Ryan closes his eyes. He takes a moment to think, to _really think_, about what he would do if a ghost chose the moment of his accidental sex tape to reveal itself on camera. He’s glad he’s not in the position to make that kind of choice.

But mostly he thinks about this: Shane had said he’d destroyed the tape. Ryan’s been wondering for two months why he’d bothered to lie about it. He could have actually destroyed it or he could have told Ryan he’d taken it, and either one of those things would have made sense to Ryan. But this—the keeping it and hiding it—he cannot explain, and Shane’s closed-off expression and the pinch of his frown say he doesn’t want Ryan to ask.

“Okay,” he says, letting Shane off the hook. He doesn’t miss the way Shane’s shoulders duck forward, grateful for the reprieve. “Let’s finish this up, alright? I’d love to get home before nine if we can manage it. Can you turn the thing back on?”

“No,” Shane says again, and he steps into Ryan’s space very deliberately. His face is an open book: relief, tiredness, interest. Even something Ryan thinks he’s beginning to recognize as _arousal_ lingering around the sharper angles of Shane’s body, as individual and identifiable as a scent.

“We can’t do this here,” Ryan says, because he’s unwilling to say something so final as _we can’t do this._

“What’re they gonna do, fire us?” Shane asks. “We already fired ourselves.”

It’s not the worst point he’s ever made. It’s made more compelling by how close he is, looming over Ryan, arms bracketing either side of his body to press Ryan’s ass against the table.

And sure, this room has a door. It does not have a lock, but the recording light is on outside, and people know better than to interrupt a session. And there aren’t even a dozen people in the whole building, as late as it is.

“What are we doing here, man?” Ryan asks. Shane blinks at him, like he thinks the hand that’s made its way to Ryan’s fly has already clearly demonstrated what he thinks they’re doing here. “I can’t keep trading hand jobs with you like Pokémon cards at recess.”

“Fair enough,” Shane says with a considering tilt of his head. He removes his hand from the front of Ryan’s shorts.

And then he goes to his knees.

*

“Stop it,” Ryan says to Shane rather later, once he’s regained feeling in his extremities. “_Stop it_.”

“Stop what?” Shane says, but the way he wipes his mouth as he raises his eyebrows suggests he knows exactly what. This jackass.

“Stop—upping the ante!”

“Stop letting me up the ante, then, if you don’t like it.”

Ryan makes some useless, dismissive noises, trying to convey that that’s not the point, even though he knows it’s kind of the point. Shane watches him do it, still smiling like he knows it to be a farce.

“Oh,” Shane says, and his smile widens. “_Oh_. I thought this was some kind of weird reciprocity thing, like you didn’t want to feel like you owed me. Blah blah blah, restore balance to the Force, whatever. But it’s just that you hate _losing_, isn’t it? I should have known.”

“In what universe is this losing?” Ryan says. “_You’re_ the one who just had an entire dick in your mouth in a Buzzfeed recording booth like a chump. Now we can’t even finish this because you sound like you gargled gravel.”

Shane waves it off, implying that they both know he’s not the first person to give head in this room and he will not be the last. “No, I’m right, aren’t I? You know you don’t have the stones to pay this one back and you’re mad you can’t keep up.”

“Pshh,” Ryan says. “Pshhhhh. Please. That’s—stupid. Don’t be—what? _Please_.”

“You are one of the most pointlessly competitive people I have ever met,” Shane says, shaking his head. “And here I swore you’d never trick me into playing a sport.”

Well, when he puts it like that Ryan _already_ feels like a winner. As premises go, this one is interesting to him.

“How many hand jobs would equal a blowjob?” Ryan asks, perking up at the first hint of gamification like a true millennial. “Points-wise, I mean. Hypothetically.”

“You’re thinking you can make up in quantity what you lack in quality or commitment?”

“I need to know the rules so I can plan my strategy, you prick. I haven’t heard you complaining about the _quality_.”

Shane waves at him impatiently, thinking. “Five handies to a beej feels about right.”

“Five!”

“Maybe three if you don’t, _you know_,” Shane says, and he smirks the knowing smirk of someone who has recently _you knowed_ and is sure he’s secured his lead. 

“What did I tell you about saying _handies_?” Ryan scowls. “Beej is almost worse. Ugh. Gross.”

“I’ll show you gross,” Shane says, and he leans in to give Ryan an emphatic kiss on the mouth, sticking his tongue in nice and deep and wriggling it around to make sure Ryan can taste himself there.

Ryan makes a big show of spluttering and grabbing for his water bottle while Shane giggles, but the truth is he doesn’t mind it.

*

Later, when he’s alone, Ryan runs the numbers.

He’s not a numbers guy, not really, but if he thinks about it in terms of points it makes sense.

Mathematically it isn’t reasonable to try to run up the score with free throws. If you can be a good three-point shooter, that’s what you want to be. If they made a shot worth five points, Ryan would want to take that too. He’d sink half-courts all day every day, if he could.

So Ryan can’t think of a good reason, when he looks at the point spread, to _not_ suck a dick.

When you think about it, it’s not even really sex. Not really. It’s more like competitive banging. It’s just _good math_.

He voices this idea a few days later, to Shane, and watches a peculiar expression pass swiftly over his face.

“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” he agrees. He’s looking around, down at his hands, anywhere but at Ryan—which Ryan finds annoying, since he really feels he deserves Shane’s undivided attention just now, while he is actively voicing his intent to maybe one day suck him off. “You know, you’re really so much more adaptable than people give you credit for.”

Ryan can’t tell if _adaptable_ is code for _slutty_. If so, Shane’s one to talk. He started this. He started _all_ of this. Ryan wasn’t the one throwing around hand stuff willy-nilly in the middle of the night like there was a going-out-of-business sale, after all.

“You started it,” Ryan says, a little snotty, because sometimes the filter between his brain and his mouth takes the day off.

Shane opens his mouth to say something, but then he shuts it again. For a moment his mouth purses, then smooths out again into a neutral line. “I guess,” he says after a moment. “So you’re just going to spring it on me when I least expect it? The suspense might kill me. I’m not a young man, Ryan.”

“Well, we didn’t put a time limit on it or anything. Maybe I’ll scoot up to you with my walker when we’re in a nursing home when we’re eighty and, like, take my teeth out. That’s when you’ll know it’s go time.”

“All gums,” Shane says, grimacing. “Very sexy.”

Ryan chomps his teeth at him, and the mood is light again, and Ryan’s not sure why it nearly went sour in the first place.

*

Ryan just thinks about it for a while. There’s no hurry, after all. He doesn’t want there to be a plan, like it’s calculated.

He wants—well. He wants it to feel right. He might joke, but he doesn’t want to be crass about it.

“I don’t want to be _crass_ about it,” he explains to Steven one day over a good Super Smash Bros sesh. He needs a sounding board, and Steven won’t understand, but he can always be trusted for honesty and good sense.

“You don’t want to be crass about getting caught up in a series of escalating sexual dares with your co-CEO?” Steven asks. “Are you sure I’m the right person for this conversation?”

“I just don’t like losing,” Ryan says, trying a new angle. He knows that, at least, is something Steven can empathize with. “Like, what, he thinks he’s better than me? Like there’s some _art_ to putting your mouth on a dong?”

“That seems like a pretty bad reason to do something you don’t want to do,” Steven says with a delicate wince. “Especially something so, you know, personal. I don’t have much of a frame of reference here, but it seems—personal.”

“What if I did want to do it?”

Steven puts down the controller and looks at him. His gaze is disconcertingly shrewd, and Ryan has to look away.

“That would be different,” he says, more gently. “If you did.”

“Yeah, it would be different,” Ryan says. Something twinges inside him, soft and uncertain. He feels suddenly and nakedly embarrassed. It makes him want to do something attention-seeking and loud to distract, like throw his own controller against the wall.

“Judge not, lest ye be judged,” Steven says, and he says it with such solemn import that Ryan forces himself to pay attention even as his eyes want to automatically glaze over at the first hint of a Biblical lecture. “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”

Ryan translates that as: Steven is judging him, but he feels sort of bad about it.

“A lot of people have casual sex, Steven,” he says, growing annoyed now. “A lot of people—I don’t know. Experiment.”

“Do they mostly experiment with people they recently started a very new and precarious business with, do you think?”

Ryan scowls. It’s a fair question, and it’s not like he hasn’t thought about that, but also, it’s _Shane_. If this was going to ruin something, it would have happened already. They’re all adults here.

“It’s barely even sex,” he says. Steven really was the wrong choice to confide in, but the circle of people in Ryan’s life with enough context to understand why this isn’t _that weird _is vanishingly small. “It’s competitive banging. It isn’t that weird.”

“Obviously I’m no expert, but I think it might be sex,” Steven says, frowning. “What’s the plan here? Are you just going to keep up your sexual war of attrition until somebody folds?”

“I guess so,” Ryan says. He hasn’t really been thinking about that; about what happens next, or after.

“What if nobody folds?”

“What, like, _ever_?”

“Yeah,” Steven says, and his eyes are twinkling now, which is even worse than the glum disapproving routine. “What if it just keeps escalating and five years from now you guys are married and have two adopted children and a mortgage in Illinois?”

That’s an outcome Ryan had not considered. He doesn’t _think_ he’s that stubborn, but he’s been wrong before.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says absent-mindedly, still mulling that one over. “I would never move to Illinois.”

“I just think if you’re going to be this stupid you need an exit strategy. Otherwise you’re still going to have troops in Iraq in two decades, and by _troops_ I mean babies and by _Iraq_ I mean a cute split-level with a white picket fence in Peoria. You should probably just talk to him about it, is all I’m saying.”

Steven starts another match up, and Ryan picks up his control from the cushion next to him, feeling sullen. He hadn’t expected Steven’s blessing, exactly, but he also hadn’t expected to come out of this feeling even more conflicted than he already did.

He doesn’t know how to explain to Steven, or to anyone, that the universe basically demanded this of him, that he felt _called_ to it. That it’s stupid, maybe, and reckless, but it also feels right when he’s in it. When it’s just him and Shane and the moment stretching like a dare between them, that held breath before one of them reaches out for the other, a challenge put out and answered—it feels _right_.

Ryan’s not an addict, but it’s only because he’s careful. He knows he has an addict’s brain locked in there somewhere, desperate for good chemicals, compulsively seeking temporary cures for perpetual problems. It’s why he smokes, but only pot; it’s why he parties, but only on weekends. A little bit of what he wants, but not everything.

Maybe he just needs to set limits for this, too.

_You can fool around, but you cannot move to Illinois_ _and adopt any babies_, he tells himself firmly.

Not that he really thinks there’s a risk of that.

*

It finally feels right in a hotel room in Vegas, after a full day spent shooting an episode for the new season of Tourist Trapped.

Really it feels like a cliché, because _Vegas_, right? But Ryan’s not above it; he’s not too good for clichés. In fact, he secretly loves them. He loves that he knows what’s expected, that there’s a script.

Making questionable decisions is _expected_ in Vegas. People look the other way, indulgent. Allowances are made.

That’s not the real reason, though. Not if Ryan is being honest.

The real reason is that it’s hotter than blazes here in the desert, and for Ryan’s touristy bit of the episode he took Shane to the MGM Grand to sip tropical drinks while floating around its famous lazy river on giant inner tubes like princes. Then he’d watched all afternoon as Shane got progressively happier, more boneless and blissed-out, more sunburned.

And _then_ he’d offered to help Shane put sunscreen on, like an _idiot_, and TJ had definitely been filming. So in six to eight weeks there’s going to be footage of himself blushing like crazy while rubbing sunscreen into Shane’s upper back and blabbering about skin cancer prevention plastered across the internet for all to see.

Shane’s shoulders had been very warm, from the sun, from the hundred-degree heat, but he’d still shivered when Ryan’s fingers had grazed the back of his neck. Ryan’s been thinking about that shiver all day.

They’ve got a three-bedroom suite at the MGM, comped thanks to the sponsorship—Vegas is always ready to play ball for digital media—and it’s pretty nice. TJ and Matty claim one bedroom, Shane and Ryan another, and Brittney gets the smallest to herself.

“Dinner in two hours,” she tells them. It’s some buffet or another, some hidden gem Shane picked. “Nap while you can. The van’s here at seven.”

“I want a shower,” Shane says. “I’m all water-logged. I smell like Coppertone and gin.”

Ryan collapses on the closer of the two beds in their room. Shane comes in after him, shutting the door behind him, heading for the attached ensuite with his change of clothes. They’re doing it up tonight to hit the casino, suits and ties, real Clooney and Pitt shit.

Ryan must fall asleep for a little while. When he wakes up, Shane’s fiddling with his hair in front of the mirror, most of the way besuited save for the jacket still hung over the chair back.

He doesn’t fuss with his hair much, or his appearance at all, generally—at least not where Ryan can see it—and Ryan watches him do it now with a frank curiosity he’s too nap-addled to conceal.

Shane’s eyes meet his in the mirror. “What?”

“What? Nothing.”

“You’re staring.”

“You look like Danny Ocean,” Ryan says, and he doesn’t bother to hide his admiration. “You look like a million bucks, all of which you stole from a casino because the owner stole your girl.”

“I thought I’d put in the effort,” Shane says with a shrug, but he looks away, a little smile on his face that says he’s pleased. It makes Ryan want to please him more. “We said we would.”

“Your tie’s crooked,” Ryan says, getting out of bed with a stretch. He needs to shower and get ready too, eventually, but for now there’s something about being mussed and unkempt next to Shane’s unusually put-together, unconventional handsomeness that he is enjoying.

“So, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand bucks, then,” Shane says. “Can’t win ‘em all.” He goes to fix the tie, but Ryan gets there first, bats Shane’s hand away to do it. There’s something about that, too.

“There,” he says after a minute, eyeing his work.

“Easy there, Betty Draper,” Shane says, raising his eyebrows. His eyes flick to the closed door, which their colleagues might well be on the other side of. “People will talk.”

“People are napping,” Ryan says, and he gets a hand on Shane’s chest and walks him back, _back_, until the backs of his knees hit the seat of the fussy wingback chair.

“I’ll wrinkle,” Shane says, less of a protest than a warning.

“Better take those pants off, then.” It’s that rare occasion where Ryan feels like he has the right smart remark at the right time, and that’s surely a sign too. The universe, again, egging him on.

Shane holds his arms out wide, _help yourself_, calling Ryan’s bluff again. And again, Ryan isn’t bluffing, and he undoes Shane’s belt and pulls down his pants and underwear together. For once Ryan’s hands are rock-steady, because it’s Vegas, and who’s going to tell him he shouldn’t?

He kneels to help Shane step out of his pants, first one foot and then the other, and then he looks up. No one is laughing now.

*

It’s not like he’s expecting to be great at this, and surely Shane has reasonable expectations too. No one is any good their first time, Ryan bets.

And most people, their first time, probably are not facing such an intimidating mouth-to-dick ratio.

He says this out loud, at the risk of ruining the mood, as Shane sits his ass down in the chair. He spreads his legs, letting Ryan settle between them. Ryan had wanted to be really sexy about this, but he’s just not sure that’s _him_. Even now he can’t stop running his mouth long enough to do something useful with it.

“_Mouth-to_—Ryan. You don’t have to impress me. I’m already impressed,” Shane says. “Didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Well, I don’t have it in me,” Ryan says, and he raises his eyebrows and allows the _yet_ to hang there unsaid. And that, at least, _is_ very sexy of him, and Shane’s hand is white-knuckled where he’s hanging onto his own thigh for dear life.

They have some time, but not a lot of time. The van will be here in less than an hour. Ryan can’t hear any noise from the main living space of the suite, can’t hear much except the faint sound of Brittney’s hair dryer, but neither of them bothered to lock the door.

“I don’t know how we got here,” Shane says quietly. He reaches out to card his hand through Ryan’s hair, still a little damp in spots, messy and thick from the pool.

“We floated here on inner tubes,” Ryan says, “the water brought us here,” and it’s a dumb, sentimental thing to say, but Shane smiles anyway. He throws his head back, as if he can’t bear to look, as if looking down at Ryan is like looking into the sun.

Ryan grips Shane’s dick at the base for support and leans in for a taste. He presses his mouth just under the head, then pulls back the foreskin to run his tongue around and up and over. Shane tastes faintly of hotel soap, of warm skin. Ryan is probably imagining the lingering taste of chlorine, because he thinks it’s how Shane _should_ taste.

He messes around for a long time, too long, getting a feel for what makes Shane produce that low whining noise, what makes his legs move restlessly, what makes him get touchy and reach for Ryan’s hair, for his cheek, for the shell of his ear. Shane is patient with him, and Ryan’s in no hurry.

“You’re _into_ this,” Shane says, his eyes bright, when he realizes.

He’s into this, or he’s into Shane, or both. Either way he likes _something_, likes it so much he’s got his hand down his swim trunks, stroking himself off in time with the unpracticed touches of his other hand, of his mouth.

He doesn’t know which would be more difficult in the long run, which option he’s rooting for.

Shane’s cheeks and nose and chest are lightly sunburned and there’s a blush on top of the sunburn, pink on pink on pale all the way down his torso. If Ryan had a hand to spare, he’d press down on the skin just to watch it go shock-white and then pink again.

“Just trying to decide if I’m going for the three or the five,” Ryan says, and he goes down as far as he can go, which isn’t that far, but Shane clearly respects the attempt. His hips jerk and then tremor with the effort of _not_ jerking.

“Better decide fast,” he says, exhaling through his nose, and that makes Ryan feel good, makes him want to be generous.

It was a lie anyway; he decided before he started. As if he would do a thing halfway, and leave points on the table.

“I work great under deadlines,” Ryan says, although that’s a lie too, and he goes back in for another taste and then another and another, trying to teach his mouth and his hand to work together in this new rhythm, letting the clutch of Shane’s hand and the disbelieving flutter of his eyelids cheer him on.

He goes down as far as he can, sloppy; he looks up, expectant. It’s enough.

“God, Ryan, I’m—_oh god_,” Shane says, low, deeper and throatier than his usual speaking voice, and he tugs sharply at Ryan’s hair, his last warning.

Then he’s coming, coming for what feels like _forever_, who _knew_ a person could come this much, and Ryan’s swallowing and using his free hand to fortify the corners of his mouth when he eventually pulls away. He rests his forehead on Shane’s knee, flush with victory.

No one says anything, no one moves. Eventually Ryan sits back on his heels, running his tongue over his teeth, deciding how he feels about new tastes and textures. Shane sits in the chair, arm thrown over his face, decidedly _wrinkled_.

“Was it the suit?” Shane asks finally. “Do I have to become a suit guy? I think it would clash with the mustache for Weird Wonderful, but I’d do it.”

“I think it was the lazy river,” Ryan says honestly. He feels high, floaty, so lit up inside that it’s far beyond turned on. “You were just—I don’t know. So exactly yourself.”

And that is revealing, to Ryan as much as anyone else—he didn’t know he was going to say that. He didn’t even know he _felt_ that.

“Oh yeah?” Shane asks. He doesn’t tug on that thread, which Ryan appreciates, but he does grin like he’s making fun of Ryan in his head.

“Stop,” Ryan says, cutting it off at the pass, but he’s smiling too. He passes his hand over his mouth in case there’s anything lingering there, wiping away the smile for good measure. Then he gets a look at Shane’s watch. “Shit, I’ve gotta shower.”

“Brush your teeth while you’re at it,” Shane says, the picture of innocence. He nods towards the door. “I’d better go out there. Less suspicious.”

Ryan eyes him critically. Shane’s still red in the face, the hair by his ears curling a little with sweat. His tie is crooked again. It’s not obvious what they’ve been doing, exactly, but it’s not a flawless façade either.

“Maybe give it a couple of minutes,” he advises, getting up to attend to his own shower. “If you give me your pants I can hang them in the bathroom while I shower, steam the wrinkles out.”

“Look at you,” Shane says, raising his eyebrows and handing them over. “So enterprising. So domestic. Betty Draper, indeed.”

“Shut _up_, Shane,” Ryan says again, and now he’s the one who’s blushing. He doesn’t know why that should be so much more embarrassing than getting on his knees for the guy, but it is. 

It just _is_.

*

After dinner Shane takes them to—where else—a museum.

“I’m pretty sure the Mob Museum’s one of the most famous museums in Vegas, Shane,” Ryan says as their media coordinator meets them at the front entrance. “Not exactly a secret banger.”

“Ah, but we’re not here for the museum,” Shane says. He lifts a finger to his lips, _shhh_, and winks at the camera. “We’re here for the speakeasy, pal. At night the museum runs a distillery and jazz club out of their basement, and you get in for free if you give the password at the door. The moonshine’s a’flowin’, the jazz is smooth, and it’s perfect for anyone longing to get away from the touristy bullshit of the Strip.”

“You didn’t seem to mind the touristy bullshit of the Strip earlier today when you were floating down it double-fisting pina coladas.”

“Ryan, I know that entering a museum triggers your allergy to learning, but just tell yourself it’s a bar,” Shane says serenely. “We’ll get you some Benadryl for the hives later.”

“Oh ho, mister funny guy over here.” It’s a weak retort, but there’s a decent jazz band on stage and Ryan’s got a glass of something dark and smooth in his hand and a belly full of buffet food, so he can’t summon up any real annoyance.

Sometimes Ryan really loves his job.

They spend an hour or so filming and enjoying the music and very lightly pregaming for their next stop, of Ryan’s choosing. Really they’ve been rocking a gentle buzz since this morning, but that’s par for the course in this town. Steven probably wouldn’t approve, but Steven’s not here, and it doesn’t impact the quality of their shots or the sharpness of their banter, so who cares?

At nine they all pile back in the shuttle and head back to the Strip.

“It’s not thirty-six hours in Vegas if you don’t hit the casinos,” Ryan says. They’re filming the transition across from the fountains at the Bellagio, so Ryan’s feeling _extra_ Ocean’s Eleven cool as he leans back against the barrier of the reflecting pool. It’ll be a pain for Matty to isolate the song so they can put something free over it for the video, but it’ll be worth the effort.

“Yeah, I guess it was inevitable, given your lack of imagination. You a gambling man, Ryan?” Shane asks him.

“Sometimes,” Ryan says, grinning at him. “I don’t mind a bit of controlled risk, if the stakes are worth it. I take it you don’t spend a lot of time in casinos?”

Shane makes a face, shaking his head. “Too smoky. Too many creeps. And the house always wins, you know that, right?”

“Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big. Then you take the house.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I’ve seen the movie too, man.”

TJ cuts and they get ready to pack up and move indoors. The Bellagio’s given them a forty-minute shooting window at a couple of slots, a craps table, and a blackjack table, so the timing’s got to be just right. Brittney’s running the whole thing like a drill sergeant.

“We can talk later about my _lack of imagination_, if you play those cards right,” Ryan says under his breath. Shane’s eyes close slowly, like a cat blinking.

The shoot passes in a blur—something to do with the free drinks that are constantly walking past you at Vegas casinos, Ryan bets—and soon it’s eleven o’clock, the time appointed by the Bellagio for clearing the cameras so as not to interrupt the casino’s _real_ business.

TJ grabs Ryan and pulls him aside.

“Britt and I are gonna run the equipment back to the hotel,” he says. “You guys ready to call it a night, or you want to stay out?”

Ryan glances over at Shane and Matty, who are crowded around a slot machine cheering on some random stranger who they’ve made a friend of. “Think we might stay out a little longer.”

“Okay.” TJ chews his lip. “Just—I’m sorry, I have to say something. _Are_ you a gambling man?” 

Ryan’s not sure what he’s getting at. His head’s a little fuzzy, from the drinks. In his eyeline Shane’s laughing at something the guy at the slot machine just said, loose and friendly from his own cocktails, arm slung over the back of the stool. It’s got more than its fair share of Ryan’s attention.

“I don’t—what?”

TJ sighs. “I’m not gonna be here this time to run interference for you if you disappear into a bathroom together for half an hour, is all I’m saying.”

It takes a minute for what TJ said to sink in. When Ryan realizes, he looks at TJ, sharp and surprised.

“It’s not like that,” he says stupidly. Which doesn’t even make _sense_, because TJ hasn’t given him even a hint of what he thinks it’s like.

“Listen, it’s none of my business,” TJ says, holding up his hands. “But try not to get banned from a casino. Or at least make it a different casino, so they don’t revoke permission for all this great footage I just shot.”

“It’s—we’re not a _thing_,” Ryan says, but he can’t make it come out right. “It’s not even _sex_, really, if you. If you think about it. It’s just competitive banging.”

TJ frowns.

“It’s not that weird!”

“It’s none of my business,” TJ repeats, but he’s looking at Ryan differently now. There’s concern there, which Ryan doesn’t like. And annoyance, or perhaps tiredness in anticipation of _future_ annoyance.

“We have a point system,” Ryan says, as if that will make it better. As if that makes it less weird. “It’s a tie game!”

TJ backs away. “Have a good night, I guess. You better know what you’re fucking doing, or the house _will_ take you.”

“How many points is it to let the house do that, do you think?” Ryan asks, taking an innocent sip of his drink, laughing when TJ’s face falls into an involuntary grimace of pure horror. He’s not that easy to wind up, usually, but this seems to be testing his limits.

“I wash my hands of all of this,” he says.

The rest of the night passes in a blur. They stay out for another couple of hours. They gamble only a little, and drink rather more, and then Shane drags him and Matty to a place called Secret Pizza tucked away in a hidden corner of The Cosmopolitan for a late-night snack.

Matty gets a little footage on his cell phone to use in the outro for the video, Ryan and Shane feeding each other massive slices of New York-style pizza, laughing as cheese and sauce gets on their chins.

Ryan wonders if Matty knows, too; if everyone knows, and nobody’s saying anything out of politeness. He concedes it’s possible that they weren’t being as subtle as he thought they were. Tomorrow morning he might care, but tonight he’s too drunk and too happy to worry about it.

“Take me home, big guy,” he says to Shane. Matty cocks his head to the side, watching them. “I have points to earn,” he informs Matty.

Shane starts giggling uncontrollably, leaning against the wall for support. Ryan shushes him.

“I’m comfortable never learning what that means,” Matty says.

*

Back at the hotel, in the relative privacy of their bedroom, Ryan’s toasted enough to say what he’s been thinking about since his conversation with TJ, which is:

“It would be a wash, right? If we…you know. No points awarded either way?”

Shane frowns up at him. He’s on one of the beds, trying to un-tie his tie, kicking his shoes off from a supine position.

“What are you asking? Sorry, I’m drunk.”

“If we…_you know_. If we fucked. It would be a wash.”

“What do you call this?”

“No, like. Shane. Come on.”

Shane rolls over onto his side. His feet are hanging off the edge of the bed and he kicks at the air, thinking. “Oh, you mean, like, the whole hog. The whole kit and caboodle.”

“The entire shebang.”

“Yeah,” Shane says after a minute. “Yeah, I think it would be—equal points for either—for both ways. Right? I don’t actually know. I hadn’t thought about it.”

“So let’s say ten points to give and ten points to—to receive.” And Ryan snickers despite his best efforts, because sometimes there’s still just a weaselly little teenaged kid inside him that he can’t shove down. Even drunk this is hard for him to talk about.

Shane scratches his nose. He runs his hand over his face and through his hair, making it stick up funny. “Sure, but if it’s ten for both and it takes two to tango, that’s the same as _no_ points. It would never change the score.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Ryan says. “So there’s no reason to do it.”

Weirdly it sounds to him like his voice comes out disappointed. He searches inside himself, trying to decide if he _feels_ disappointed, but all he feels is sloshy from the drinks and a little uncomfortable from the grease of the pizza. He can’t get through the physical sensations to figure out what he’s feeling underneath that.

“No points-related reasons, no.”

“Speaking of which,” Ryan says, steamrollering right along, because it hurts his head to think about that right now. “TJ knows.”

“What?” Shane sits up.

“Yeah, he took me aside and said some shit. I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t a big deal, that it was just competitive banging, but the concept didn’t seem to resonate. I’m starting to think we made it up, because no one else seems to know about it.”

Shane looks at Ryan for a very long time. His face is blank, unreadable. Ryan wonders if he’d be able to read it sober.

“You told him that?”

“Yeah, I was trying to explain why he didn’t need to worry. Only it didn’t seem to work, because then he got _more_ worried.”

Shane’s still looking at Ryan like Ryan’s grown a second head. “Did he.”

“So did Steven, when I explained it to him, but then Steven _wouldn’t_ get it, would he? So that was on me. I was like, ‘Stevie my boy, don’t make that face at me, it’s not even really sex when you think about it,’ but he kept making the face. You know the face. The judgy one.”

“I know the face.” Shane pulls his legs under him to sit cross-legged on the bed. He’s staring into his lap, pulling his socks off, playing with the hem of his pants leg where it’s starting to unravel. “And then what did he say?”

“Something about Peoria. I don’t remember,” Ryan lies. It’s immaterial, anyway. Shane doesn’t need to know about that.

“So, to summarize,” Shane says, and his voice sounds strange, clipped. “Steven knows and TJ knows, but it’s okay because you explained to both of them that we’re just doing it in the spirit of friendly competition and anyway it’s not really even sex, and that they shouldn’t worry because it doesn’t matter?”

“Yeeeah,” Ryan says. “Yeah, that’s about it. That’s most of it.”

“Well, okay then.”

“_Is_ it okay?” Ryan asks, hesitant, because something about it seems off. Shane’s smile is too pasted-on, his voice a little too cheery. Something inside Ryan is clanging a warning, trying to get through to his stupid, drunk brain.

“Of course it is,” Shane says, and he sounds a little more like himself. He gestures at Ryan, beckoning him over to the bed. “Thanks for setting the record straight. Now weren’t you talking a big game earlier about earning points? And something about proving me wrong about your lack of imagination?”

“I think I’m too far gone to put anything in my mouth,” Ryan warns, but he’s buzzing inside too, wanting it as soon as Shane reminded him of the possibility, wanting to touch and be touched.

He jumps onto the bed, half onto Shane, making him go _oof_ and put an arm around Ryan to steady him. Yeah, he can manage something.

*

Only after he’s gotten Shane off, Shane doesn’t reach for him in turn, and that’s different.

Ryan presses his hips against him, reminding him, and Shane pulls away. He goes up on his elbow, looking down at Ryan, and Ryan still can’t read him.

“What—”

“You win,” Shane says. “Nine to eight, I think, if my math’s right. Good game.”

Ryan frowns. He’s already got the beginnings of a headache, a mere shadow of the one he’ll have in the morning. “I don’t understand.”

Shane presses a kiss to his lips, almost chaste. His eyes are soft and sleepy and sad. “I’m not competitive, not like you. It was just a dumb bit that got out of hand anyway. I didn’t mean for it to get this far, and somebody’s gotta say _when_, you know?”

“You’re letting me win?”

“There’s just no winning in it for me,” Shane says. He doesn’t sound mad, exactly, but it still makes Ryan deflate like he’s about to be yelled at. It’s just that five minutes ago they were smiling, they were laughing, and now—

It’s not that it feels like a fight; it’s that it feels _final_. It feels like a door closing, and Ryan wants to stick a desperate foot out to catch it, but there’s something in Shane’s voice that says it’s already too late.

The door is slammed, and locked, and Shane is speaking to him through the crack under it.

“But I was—it was good? It was fun, wasn’t it?”

Shane smiles. He pushes Ryan’s hair back from his face with his palm. “Yeah, it was fun. I’m not _sorry_, Ry. I’m just done.”

And what can Ryan say to that? There’s nothing to say. There’s no way to talk someone out of such a completely reasonable position, and no way to try without sounding like a colossal asshole.

“Okay,” Ryan says.

Because it’s what you do when you’ve finished a game, he puts his hand out for Shane to shake. He’s trying to be the gracious winner and a graceful loser at the same time. Even though he’s technically won on points, he can’t help but feel like he’s lost; like he took his eyes off the table for a moment and now the house has taken him after all.

He can’t say he wasn’t warned.

“Very sporting of you,” Shane says, smiling, and he shakes. “Just—let it alone, okay, Ryan? Take the W and move on.”

He rolls over to go to sleep. Ryan drags himself out of Shane’s warm bed and back to his own colder one.

He wonders if this is how Shane felt all those months ago, alone in the dark while Ryan had slept: turned on, and confused, and too keyed up to sleep for a very long time. Afraid for what the morning might hold.

*

The morning doesn’t hold anything. They finish shooting in Vegas and head home in the early afternoon, and they’re back in LA by dinnertime, and life goes on.

It’s all so blisteringly normal, so exactly the way it was before. It shouldn’t be that way, Ryan thinks. Something like that should leave a mark. It’s almost as if by saying _it doesn’t matter_ so many times, he spoke it true.

Ryan dreams, sometimes. He wakes up hard and sweating, plastered to the sheets or else curled up in a little ball, with only the vague fleeting sense of familiar smells and sounds. Soft hair under his fingers, a leg thrown between his own, little gasps and moans caught behind lips or teeth like their maker was half-afraid of them.

“Well, I fucked it up,” he tells Steven one day over lunch when Shane’s working from home on Puppet History stuff.

“You’re going to need to be more specific,” Steven says. He is not giving Ryan his full attention. He’s got his laptop out and like four different spreadsheets open, which is disgusting.

“Shane,” Ryan says glumly. “I fucked it up by winning the thing.”

“Good job,” Steven says, still distracted. “You didn’t even have to do the thing with Illinois and all the babies.”

“He let me win, actually. The details would shock you.”

“Well, don’t tell me, then. I mean, you seem okay. You both seem normal. Isn’t that the best anyone could hope for here?”

The problem was that for a while it was _better_ than normal. It was _normal-plus_. It’s rather like if, having discovered the deliciousness of the cheesy gordita crunch, someone told him he would have to go back to his old regular Taco Bell order. That had been good enough before, when he didn’t know there was something else, but now he _knows_.

“I just want to understand what happened,” Ryan says slowly. “I thought it was going pretty well—you know, sexually speaking—and then he threw in the towel.”

“Well, you’re an adult,” Steven says. “You know what you’re going to have to do.”

“Yeah.” Ryan knows there’s only one path forward here.

“Talk to him,” Steven finishes, at the same time as Ryan says, “I’ve gotta break into his apartment and steal that fuckin’ tape.”

“What _tape_?”

Ryan ignores him. “And you’re going to help me.”

*

Admittedly, if Ryan was putting a heist team together and had a wealth of options from which to choose, Steven Lim would probably not be one of his top picks. He is, for one, in possession of a disturbingly well-calibrated moral compass. He is, for a second, the single person in the world least-equipped to help Ryan analyze a sex tape for clues.

“Is there a reason you can’t just talk to him?” Steven is asking him. He’s wringing his hands and looking troubled.

“Shut up, Steven,” Ryan says. “Okay, here’s the deal. There’s this—tape, okay.”

“Do I want to know what the tape is of?” Steven asks. “I don’t, do I. Never mind. Don’t tell me.”

“Sometimes when you work in digital media you find you have accidentally made a sex tape, and that’s just life,” Ryan tells him sternly.

“Is it, though?”

“Anyway, Shane kept it and lied about it, and he was very squirrely about it. And then when he—waved the white flag, or whatever, in Vegas, he was also squirrely about _that_, and I think they’re connected.”

“Uh huh.”

“So we’re going to Ocean’s Eleven this shit, man! We’re just going to break into his apartment real quick and take it and watch it. I’m the Clooney, obviously. And the Pitt. And Matt Damon. Also the twins, and the guy who blows stuff up.”

“Which one am I?” Steven says. “_Don’t_ say the Asian one. Also, I am not watching that tape.”

Ryan thinks about that one for a minute. “Honestly, you’re none of them, man, but I’m working with what I’ve got here.”

Steven sighs. “I should never have let you two do the Vegas shoot. I knew it, when I saw you watching Ocean’s Eleven for the seventh time and going on about suits I _knew_ it, I just knew you were going to get ideas—”

“I just need to see the tape, man,” Ryan says. “I need to see it so I can understand. It’s like…it’s like when teams watch footage of their games after the fact, so they can figure out what went wrong and improve, you know? I need all the information, and I don’t have it.”

“I’m not sure breaking and entering is the way. Anyway, don’t you have a spare key to Shane’s apartment?”

“That’s not even the point, Steve!”

Honestly, Ryan doesn’t know how he’s supposed to heist under these conditions.

*

It becomes abundantly clear that Ryan’s going to have to be the one to do all the heisting, since Steven categorically refuses to help.

“I’m not doing that,” Steven says flatly the minute Ryan gets to the _climb up the fire escape_ part of his plan.

“We’ve got to, Steven, he lives on the third floor.”

“You have a _key_ to his _apartment_!”

Seriously, Steven won’t shut up about this key thing. Ryan ignores him again.

“Okay, well, then I’ll climb up the fire escape and through the bedroom window and you can keep watch. Gotta keep your nose clean, huh, Stevie boy?”

Steven mutters something that sounds suspiciously like _but you have a key_. In the end, though, he agrees to be the lookout. He’s also playing the critical role of the distraction, because somebody’s gotta lure Shane out of his apartment on a Saturday afternoon, and for obvious reasons it cannot be Ryan.

At the appointed time, Steven makes the call. He makes it from the passenger seat of Ryan’s car, parked around the corner from Shane’s apartment at what Ryan’s deemed to be a covert distance.

Ryan watches Steven wait for it to ring through. “What if he doesn’t—” Steven starts to say, and then he’s shaking his head and turning subtly in the other direction. “Hey, Shane. Sorry to bother you on a weekend, but I was wondering if you could pop in to the office and make sure the raw footage from yesterday’s Watcher Weekly filming is saved on the computer.”

He listens for a moment as Shane speaks. “Yeah, no, Anthony says it isn’t in the Drive.”

Steven glances at Ryan, who nods encouragingly. He can tell this is testing the limits of Steven’s moral flexibility. The man is not a natural liar.

“If you could—ASAP, yeah, he wanted to work on the cut this weekend, and I’m stuck at home for, uh—” and he looks at Ryan, panicked, unable to come up with something.

_Sign for a package_, Ryan mouths, miming signing on his hand.

“—I’ve got to sign for a delivery this afternoon, so,” Steven finishes lamely. “Cool, awesome, thanks, man.”

He hangs up his phone and looks peevishly at Ryan. “That felt very wrong and I didn’t like it.”

Ryan claps him on the shoulder. “It’s for the good of the company. Your heart is true. You’re a pal and a confidante, and I won’t forget it.”

A few minutes later they see Shane’s car go past. Ryan ducks down, sliding low in the seat so Shane can’t spot them in the rearview. Steven just stares at him, nonplussed, like he’s never seen a single detective or cop show in his entire life. Possibly he hasn’t.

Ryan really can’t think of anyone less well-suited to a life of subterfuge.

“Stay here and keep watch,” he instructs. “Text me if you see his car before I come back. I’m going in.”

Steven rolls his eyes. He’s already got his phone unlocked again, checking his emails and probably fantasizing about an alternate reality where he started a company with other people.

*

In the end, Ryan uses the key.

He makes it up the fire escape just fine, biceps coming in clutch, but by the time he’s gotten up to Shane’s apartment he discovers the bedroom window locked.

Shane never locks his windows usually, which Ryan knows because he’s given him shit for it before (“_How_ many True Crime eps have we done where someone got murked in the middle of the night by some creep who shimmied in the window, dude?”). Now that he’s in the position of being the creep in question, it’s frustrating to find that Shane seems to have taken his advice for once.

So he goes back down the fire escape and slinks into Shane’s building the usual way, letting himself into Shane’s apartment with the spare key he’s had since Shane went to Chicago for Christmas last year and needed someone to feed his cat.

If Steven asks, Ryan’s going to say he did the whole b&e thing.

The cat in question rushes him the minute he closes the door, winding around his feet until Ryan bends down to scratch his ears.

“Hey, buddy,” he says. “How’s tricks? We’re not going to tell your dad I was here, okay. It’ll be our little secret.”

Obi lets out a little _mrrp_, which Ryan takes for a yes, and follows Ryan into Shane’s bedroom because he’s a valuable part of the heist team.

While there’s plenty to interest Ryan in Shane’s little bedside drawer, he zeroes in on the tape right away, there exactly where Ryan saw it last.

He wonders if Shane’s watched it since. If he watches it regularly.

The plan was for Ryan to pocket the tape for further analysis and get out right away, and he’s already wasted enough time with the whole fire escape thing. Still, the office is a solid half hour drive from Shane’s apartment each way, and importing the footage into Google Drive will take another half an hour at least. That means Ryan’s got a little time to kill, and his curiosity is killing him.

It doesn’t take him long to find a camcorder in Shane’s second bedroom, which he uses as an office—they’ve all got filming equipment at home, it comes with the territory. He perches on Shane’s bed and slips the tape in, and he’s got the footage all cued up when he hears it.

The turn of a key in a lock.

The telltale creak of the front door, opening.

Obi takes off down the hall to welcome the new arrival, and Ryan listens, frozen, as Shane greets him in low, soothing tones. He hears the _thunk_ of Shane’s shoes as he kicks them off, the rattle of his keys as he drops them on the table by the door.

Ryan looks to the window, but he’s not sure he can make it there in time. If the lock were to get stuck, or if he were to make too much noise wriggling out—no. His only other option, which he also doesn’t love, is to hide, and hope that Shane leaves again soon, or decides to take a nap.

Making a split-second decision, Ryan slides as quietly as he can to the floor, clutching the camcorder. He shimmies under the bed just as he hears Shane’s footfall in the hallway, headed his way.

Shane starts to whistle. At first Ryan thinks he’s doing it idly, as he often does. Then he realizes Shane is whistling the Kill Bill whistle as he wanders at a leisurely pace down the hall in Ryan’s direction, which means Ryan’s goose is already _well_ past cooked.

It means that somehow, some way, Shane _knows he is here_.

Shane stops in the doorway to his bedroom. Obi comes rocketing in too, up onto the bed and then off it and then onto it again, in the skittish way of cats. Ryan’s really gotta get some better co-conspirators.

“What’s up, buddy?” Shane asks his cat. Ryan can see his shoes mere feet away, under the gap left by the duvet. “Something wrong? Something got you upset?”

He pauses.

“Like, for example, an _intruder_?”

Shane’s feet walk the rest of him over to his closet. Ryan hears the squeak of the door as it opens, as Shane peeks inside. “No, that would be too on-the-nose, wouldn’t it?” he muses.

Which, okay, rude, but Ryan doesn’t have the opportunity to lean into his annoyance. He doesn’t have the opportunity because he feels the sudden, intense tickle in his nostrils, the cat hair under the bed having come for him at last, setting off his allergies. _Please no_, he thinks, _please_—

And then, because god is dead, Ryan sneezes.

Shane’s shoes pivot to him at once and make for the bed, and Ryan knows he’s done for. Shane kneels, his hand reaches to flip the duvet cover aside, and then he’s staring right at Ryan plastered to the floor under his bed.

Shane sighs.

“You know, Ryan, when I pictured you in my bed this wasn’t quite what I had in mind,” he says, but he offers his hand to Ryan all the same, helping Ryan worm his way out from under the bed and brushing cat hair off his shirt.

“Steven Lim is the worst lookout of all time,” Ryan says.

Shane laughs, but it’s a guarded laugh, chilly. “More than that. He sold you out, man. While you were busy going full Ghost Protocol up the side of my apartment building he called back to apologize for aiding and abetting your wild criminality. So naturally I turned around to come catch you.”

“That traitor,” Ryan says, but he can’t be too mad about it. He’d known Steven wasn’t the right fit for this sort of malarkey. He would never have asked, except that Steven had been his only option.

He puts the camcorder down on Shane’s bed next to him, because there’s no use hiding his true purpose now that the jig is up. Shane looks at it, and then at Ryan, and he isn’t smiling now.

“You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you,” he says, and he sounds so crushingly _disappointed_ that Ryan wants to sink into the floor and disappear. “I knew this about you, of course. I know how you can be, how you don’t know when to quit. I guess I hoped this time you’d make an exception, because I asked. As a favor to me.”

In an instant, all the giddiness from today’s little escapade drains right out of Ryan. He’d thought this might be something they would laugh about together, sort of half a farce and half a rom-com, but he sees now that he’s wildly misjudged the situation.

“Shane,” he says, but he doesn’t know what to say after that. He couldn’t sit up straight if he wanted to; shame is curving his shoulders in on themselves, rendering him as small as he feels.

“It’s okay,” Shane says, although obviously it isn’t. “A leopard can’t change his spots. Go ahead, then. Watch it.”

“Right now?”

Shane nods. “You had to see it so badly you broke into my apartment for it, so yeah. Now.”

It’s clear that Shane is not asking him but _telling_ him. Feeling like he isn’t particularly in a position to object, Ryan presses play on the video.

It’s night vision, the way they always record their overnight footage, and Ryan can tell right away that the footage is cleaner than Shane had presented it, when they’d talked about it months ago. He can make out himself and Shane clearly, two sleeping forms in the too-small bed. He can mostly see their faces, peeking out above the covers.

Ryan can tell when his video self starts to dream, because he thrashes around until he’s pressed up against Shane like a lamprey, face planted in his chest. He can tell when Shane wakes up because he puts a startled hand on video-Ryan’s back.

“Here’s where it gets good,” Shane says, leaning in to watch over Ryan’s shoulder.

In the video, Shane’s trying to wake him up. “Ryan,” he whispers. “Shit. Hey, Ryan, you’re—oh shit.”

Ryan moans. Shane _audibly_ swallows—it’s amazing the camera’s sensitive enough to pick that up at all, the tiny nervous click of his throat, the rustle of his hand on Ryan’s side.

“Ryan, man, hey. You need to wake up.”

From then, Ryan mostly remembers it, and as he watches the video now he aligns it in his head with his own memories, well-worn now from going over them so many times.

He hears himself say _yeah, yes_, hoarse and desperate, when Shane makes his offer. Watches the covers move as Shane works him over, and Shane’s mouth on his neck, and his own face, slack with pleasure. Hears himself come with a guttural sob, a sound so gut-wrenching he might have mistaken it for pain rather than pleasure if he didn’t remember, still, how good it had felt. Hears Shane’s hiss of real pain to match, Ryan’s heel getting him right in the calf hard enough to bruise, and his surprised puff of laughter when he shakes it off.

It's messy and imperfect, sure, but it’s theirs. It’s a part of what they are now, even if they never touch like that again. Ryan feels a flicker of—_something_. A nostalgic longing for that recent past, or else just plain and simple longing. 

“Well, that’s not so—” he starts, but Shane doesn’t let him finish.

“Show’s not over,” he says.

And then, as Shane’s hand stills under the covers, he leans in again like he means to kiss Ryan properly. But video Ryan’s already just about asleep again, that useless motherfucker, and he doesn’t move, doesn’t react.

It’s like watching security camera footage of somebody about to be attacked, Ryan thinks—watching and wanting to yell out a warning, but knowing they’re beyond his help, that it’s too late. That the harm _has_ already been done after all.

All he can do is watch the little camcorder window in dawning horror, willing his past self to be different this time, to be better. _Wake up, asshole. Say something. Do something._

But it’s Shane, in the video, who says something: “Well how ‘bout that, you menace?” he asks Ryan, gentle as anything. He wipes his hand on the sheet and then he presses it to Ryan’s collarbones, spanning much of the width of his chest. “Ryan?”

There’s a long moment of silence where Shane watches, and listens, and understands.

“Oh,” he says, and Ryan is forced to just sit there and watch in mounting despair as the hopeful smile splinters into a million pieces and falls right off his face. “Well, that’s—yeah. Fair enough.”

He’s still touching Ryan so carefully in sleep, rubbing his thumb in a slow circle just above the neck of Ryan’s t-shirt. It’s the touch of a man who has thought about doing it a thousand times; who has looked and never touched and thinks he will never do so again. It makes Ryan’s gut roil with guilt and a desperate sort of sadness to watch it, how tender Shane was with him, even in his disappointment.

Ryan can’t believe he missed it. He can’t believe that by the next morning Shane was able to put this away somewhere, tucked up and hidden, so Ryan never saw a bit of it.

In the video, minutes pass. Shane finally pulls his hand away, clenches his fist, and drags his whole body away to lie flat on his back.

“You’re a sucker,” he says to no one, to the air, to the elaborately-paneled ceiling. “Just, really. Pathetic.”

And then he gets up from the bed and disappears out of frame. Ryan hears a door open and shut—the bathroom. Shane stays in the bathroom a long time, and when he emerges it’s to sit in the little frilly chair by the window that’s too small for him, legs curled up under him, clutching a cup of water. He doesn’t go back to bed.

Back in the present, Ryan’s snapped out of it when Shane leans over his shoulder to press the stop button on the camcorder.

“Pretty hot stuff, huh,” he says with an acerbic sort of smile. “Talk about adding insult to injury.”

“You’re not pathetic,” Ryan blurts out. It’s all he can say because it’s all he can think about, while he’s still processing. “You’re not. You weren’t.”

Of course Ryan understands now why Shane was keen to hide this tape, and why once it was discovered he played it down to discourage Ryan’s interest. The squirreliness makes perfect sense now, and so does the way it all subsequently spun out of control—Ryan blundering along, thoughtlessly poking every last one of Shane’s old bruises. Asking for more, always _more_, of Shane than he could safely give away, but of course Shane gave it anyway, until he simply couldn’t do it any longer.

“I’m sorry,” Ryan says. “I didn’t know.”

Shane smiles again, but it’s just a reflex, no true expression of joy. “I asked you to leave it.”

Ryan feels like there’s a hand around his heart, clutching it in a vice-grip and shoveling it right up his chest and into his throat. It makes it hard to breathe, hard to speak.

He wants to go back an hour and listen to Steven and call this off. He wants to go back a few weeks, to that hotel room in Las Vegas, and find honest, adult ways to express his anxieties about this fragile new thing they were growing together.

He wants to go back five months, to yet another hotel room, and open his fucking eyes, and _smile_.

“Why didn’t you just get rid of that?” Ryan asks. “If you knew I wouldn’t.”

Shane shrugs, and it’s _such_ a shrug, a full-bodied, helpless sort of thing that suggests to Ryan he’s asked himself that question a hundred times; held the tape, watched it, and each time contemplated tossing it in the bin, never quite able to bring himself to do it.

“Who knows. Proof that it happened, I guess, at first. And then a reminder to myself, when—just, a reminder about the danger of unrealistic expectations. So I wouldn’t be a sucker a third time.”

“A third?”

“First, that night,” Shane says, nodding in the direction of the camera. “And then after, when I thought—when I thought we might be on the same page. But you disabused me of that notion pretty handily in Vegas, so thanks.”

“_There’s no winning in it for me_,” Ryan echoes, remembering.

Shane spreads his hands wide; his palms empty, without guile, concealing no secrets now.

“It turns out it’s really hard to play a game when you haven’t agreed on what you’re playing for,” he says. “Not your fault. Mine, maybe, but in my defense I was having a really good time. I thought maybe we’d manage to meet in the middle, easy as pie, but no such luck.”

Ryan feels like that’s not quite fair, somehow. He thinks if he’d known he was under warranty, _on_ _probation_, he might have done things differently.

“What if we still could?” he asks. “What if we were still meeting? What if some of us are just further from the middle to begin with, and have further to go, and, and it’s _hard_?” 

Shane shakes his head, and his mouth is thin and his eyes are downcast, and it makes Ryan want to crush the stupid tape under his heel. He opens his mouth to keep going, but Shane cuts him off.

“Ryan, if you push me on this, if you try to be cute about it, you will wake up one morning and I’ll just be,” and he clenches his fists and opens them wide, _poof_, “gone.”

And that’s such a terrifying thought that it stops every single _but what if_ Ryan had been working on dead in its tracks. The possibility of a life without Shane in it—no warning, no goodbye—makes him nauseated and panicky, the way he feels in the first seconds after he wakes up from a dream where something horrible has happened to someone he loves, when he still isn’t sure if it’s real or not.

Ryan shuts his mouth.

*

He knows, now, what he should have done.

In those precious seconds and minutes of afterglow, he should have opened his eyes. He should have opened his fucking eyes and looked at the person who had just touched him so intimately and pretended it was no big deal. He should have _really_ looked, and seen through it.

But because he didn’t do that, he dreams about it. Now that he knows, his brain replays it over and over, fixing it as he sleeps.

He dreams that he smiles into Shane’s chest, and when Shane rumbles, “Well how ‘bout that?” he laughs, exhausted, exhilarated.

And then he says something back, something like, “How about it?” or “Finally, right?” because while he hadn’t been thinking that, not back then, he’s pretty sure Shane had been.

Then he reaches down for where Shane is hard and hot against his thigh. Shane might be too polite to ask, but this time it occurs to Ryan because he knows enough to want it, and to be confident in it.

He says something suave and sexy and shit, “Let me take care of that for you, baby,” and Shane shivers and shakes under his hands, and Ryan returns the favor with every ounce of enthusiasm and skill he’s picked up in the last few months. It is unquestionably the most _sex_ that sex has ever been.

He surges up to kiss Shane as Shane comes—how is it they didn’t kiss, that night?—catching his soft cry so they don’t wake the neighboring rooms, so people don’t talk about those Hollywood guys with their questionable ghost radio, waggling their dicks all over the place.

Ryan snuggles in close as Shane catches his breath. They’re sweaty and sticky and objectively gross, but Ryan doesn’t care. All he cares about is making sure Shane knows he isn’t going anywhere, that this wasn’t a one-off, that he _means_ it. That if he is now unmoored, they can be unmoored together.

“So that’s how it is?” Shane asks. His hands are doing it again, mapping out the parts of Ryan’s body he’s allowed to touch now that he wasn’t before, which is most of them.

This time Ryan’s awake to feel it, and Shane’s purposeful petting makes him glow all over with an enormous sense of care when he affirms, “Yeah, I guess it is, big guy.”

Every time Ryan wakes up furious, stewing in the knowledge of how easy it could have been.

*

He can’t stop thinking about a line from some poem he read in high school.

That, in itself, is unusual. Ryan probably only read like four poems in high school, like really _properly_ read them, and he always assumed he’d retained none of it except that plums in the icebox one, because that was fuckin’ hilarious.

Okay, so he doesn’t even remember the whole line, just the gist. Something about two ships passing in the night, and they just have this one moment of connection before they chug off in different directions, each traveling at different speeds, never to be in the same place again.

He feels like Shane’s a proper ship, something weathered but dignified, steaming along at—at whatever a normal amount of knots is for a boat, Ryan doesn’t know. And Ryan himself is a stupid little dinghy, or maybe a sailboat with one single sail, and it took him a while to unfurl the thing and catch the wind but he’s on his way now, he’s sailing, and if Shane would only let him _catch up_—

If they could just be on the same patch of ocean again, just for a few minutes, Shane could put an oar out, if he even still wanted to. And this time, Ryan would grab it.

Ryan really doesn’t know much at all about boats.

*

“Hey Steve?” Ryan asks one day when he and Steven are playing a pickup game of one-on-one basketball. He’s breathing heavy from the exertion, sweating disgustingly, and it’s really not the time—but then Shane’s around most of the time these days, so there isn’t a lot of opportunity for private conversations.

“Mmm?” Steven grunts as Ryan knocks the shot out of his hands. He bends over at the waist, sticking his head into his t-shirt to wipe his sweaty face.

“What do you do when you’re maybe in love with someone?”

Steven’s eyes peek at him over the neck of the t-shirt. “I tell them.”

Not super helpful. Like a broken record, this guy.

“Okay, well, what if the person in question was probably in love with you before, only you weren’t in love with them, and now you are maybe kind of a little bit in love with them but in the meantime they’ve fallen _out_ of love with you because they got sick of waiting for you to wise up? Are you doomed to be, like, two ships passing in the night? To never be at the same place at the same time again?”

Steven jogs over to the bench for his water bottle, and Ryan follows.

“I _tell them_,” Steven repeats, taking a swig. “Maybe they didn’t fall out of love with me. Maybe they just pretended to because it was easier.”

“What if you’re sure they’re telling the truth because you hurt them really badly by implying you only wanted to mess around? Even though it turns out you really wanted to date them, like, _hard_?”

Ryan’s out of breath, and it’s definitely from bullshit and not from the exertion of their game.

Steven tosses his water bottle aside. He gives Ryan a severe look, and Ryan digs through his store of self-pity to spare a little for Steven, who has put up with quite a lot in the last few months, who’s had to sit by and watch while Ryan did his level best to ruin everything they’ve all worked so hard for.

“You’re stupid if you think he doesn’t still love you,” Steven says, dropping his towel and the pretense. “I tried to tell you.”

Well, of course Ryan knows that _now_.

“It’s just that it’s always been jokes with us,” he says. “Just jokes and bits, we’re never—he’s never serious. I don’t know how I was supposed to guess that this one time, he was serious. Was there some secret signal I was supposed to pick up? Some, like—_clue_ that a Midwesterner in my vicinity was experiencing a sincere feeling?”

“If I told you that, I’d be violating our code of secrecy,” Steven says, tapping the side of his nose. “Midwest rise up!”

“Read the room, Steve.”

“I’ve been telling you this whole time to talk to him,” Steven says, and he sounds _so_ weary. “I don’t know why you expected to hear something different this time. You keep looking for easy ways out of this, and there aren’t any.”

“He as much as told me I missed the boat, man. He said if I pushed him he’d—well. I can’t take that chance.”

Steven watches him for a long moment, and he doesn’t even bother to hide his disappointment. Whatever. Ryan’s used to it by now. There’s barely a person left in his life these days he hasn’t let down in some fundamental way.

“You’re not even going to try, are you?” 

Ryan ignores him and trots off to grab the ball. Maybe he can’t fix this, but he sure as shit can whoop Steven’s ass at basketball. He can run himself exhausted, until he’s too bone-tired to feel anything at all.

“And your metaphor sucks!” Steven yells after him.

*

Doing an advice podcast was, obviously, a mistake. Ryan knows that now.

“I’ve got a question,” Steven says, clearing his throat into his mic. “This one is from a listener who would like to remain anonymous.”

“You’ve gotta give them a name,” Shane prompts him.

“Oh, right. Okay. We’ll call them, um, Lovestruck Idiot.”

Ryan’s not entirely paying attention. Shane’s sitting across from him in the little corner of desks in the office where they record the pod, next to the window. The sunlight is streaming in and hitting his hair, making every strand shine a different tone of brown and caramel and even, if Ryan squints, a little bit of red.

“Lovestruck Idiot writes: ‘Hello, Watcher boys! Hoping you can help me figure out this conundrum. I’m in love with my longtime friend, and the catch is that he’s also my coworker!’”

Steven looks up, waiting for a reaction, which he does not get.

“Because we have poor judgment and lack self-control, we have already made love multiple times despite never having had a real conversation about our feelings, so I am pretty sure they are attracted to me,” he continues, reading from his phone. “How do I tell my friend I want to be more than just eff-buddies despite the high-stakes nature of our relationship?”

“Made love?” Ryan asks, narrowing his eyes. “_Eff-buddies_? Does it actually say eff-buddies? Hang on. Who’s this from again?”

Steven looks down at his phone again. The tips of his ears are bright red. “It’s from an anonymous listener, Ryan.”

Ryan accepts that this is his own fault, or at the very least some sort of karmic punishment. He’s the one who introduced Steven to subterfuge in the first place, after all. He’s given Steven the tools of his own destruction.

Shane seems not to have noticed anything is amiss. “That’s a tricky one,” he says, scratching his stubble. The mic catches the noise, amplifying it, making the hair on the back of Ryan’s neck stand up. “Very tricky.”

“I think it’s obvious this person shouldn’t risk their whole happiness and career on something that might backfire,” Ryan says, frowning at Steven, warning him. “If you’ve been physical and the person never bothered to tell you they wanted something more, maybe it’s because they just _don’t_, you know? Or maybe they did, but they changed their mind.”

“No!” Steven squawks. “No, Lovestruck Idiot should obviously confess his—their—feelings to his—_their_—friend before it’s too late. It’s all probably a big misunderstanding, and if they both use their words like adults they can just be happy. Just! Be _happy_!”

Steven seems to have developed something of an eye twitch in the last couple of weeks. Ryan supposes that’s his fault, too.

They fall silent, waiting for Shane to weigh in. Ryan is certain Shane will take his side. After all, Shane himself—

“I think I agree with Steven on this one,” Shane says. “If Lovestruck Idiot feels that strongly about their friend, they should tell them, whatever happens. Life’s too short to live in fear, you know? Worst case scenario, they don’t want a relationship and you can go back to being friends and coworkers with some closure.”

Ryan can’t even help himself.

“Are you kidding me?” he asks. “Seriously, Shane. Are you. Fucking. Kidding me.”

He can hear his own voice getting louder and higher-pitched, but it can’t be helped. He cannot believe Shane would open his mouth and say, with such smooth conviction, something so blatantly hypocritical.

“What?”

“What kind of _do as I say, not as I do_ bullshit is this?”

“Ryan.”

“No!” Ryan all but yells. He points at Shane, right up in his face. “_No_. You do not get to sit there and say, _oh, just talk to them_, when you yourself—”

“Ryan—”

“When _you yourself_ went to extreme lengths to hide your feelings from me for god knows how long! How long was it, Shane? Months? Years?”

Steven whistles under his breath, a long, low noise. He sits back in his chair, slinking down like he can duck out of this fight he went well out of his way to set up in the first place.

Ryan’s been so busy feeling guilty and pissed at himself that he hadn’t realized he was hopping mad at Shane as well, but his hands are shaking now, he’s so angry. Shane’s got a look on his face like Ryan slapped it, shocked and flushed pink right at the high point of the cheeks, and it makes Ryan almost wish he had.

“And yeah, I should have figured it out, obviously. I never claimed to be a smart guy. But you! Talk about mixed messages. Because you did absolutely everything you could to make sure I didn’t figure it out, _you_—all casual, talking about us like it was a _sport, _always being the one to take it farther, but hey, it’s just jokes here, right?”

“Maybe now’s not the time for this,” Shane says quietly, darting a glance over at Steven.

“Oh, whatever, he reaps what he sows. I’m just saying that maybe it’s not fair to punish me for falling for your bullshit. You made damn sure that bullshit was really fucking convincing, you put a lot of time and energy into it, dude, and you know it. You pathologically non-confrontational piece of shit.”

“I said,” Shane says quietly, darting a glance over at Steven, “I _said_ it was my fault.”

“Then why am I the one paying for it?”

They fall quiet. Steven switches his mic off, stands up, and makes for the door. Ryan lets him go.

In the doorway he turns around. “Just be happy, okay? It’s not—it doesn’t have to be this hard. Just move to Illinois and adopt the, the, the _f-fucking_ babies already, and be happy!”

*

After he flounces off, they take a beat to let the power of a rare Steven Lim f-bomb wash over them. Ryan understands, now, why he saves them up, why he doesn’t waste them on lesser annoyances.

Shane’s got his eyes trained out the window. His hands are folded in his lap; those lovely long fingers, the ones Ryan misses so much in his hair, on his face.

“Steven’s right, this is ridiculous,” Ryan says. He crosses his arms. Now that his guilt has tipped over into anger, and his anger has begun to recede into a sort of crippling soul-level numbness, he finds that he’s just _tired_. “I’m so, I’m so _stupid_ in love with you, man. I would have told you before, but you made it pretty clear that if I tried you’d vanish into the night like the Lindbergh baby and I’d never see you again.” 

“I didn’t want you to say things you didn’t mean out of desperation not to lose me.”

“So you thought it was better to make me swallow things I _did_ mean out of desperation not to lose you?”

Shane inclines his head, conceding the point.

“I wasn’t ready, in Oregon,” Ryan says. “And I wasn’t ready after, not for a long time, and I’m sorry about that. I’ve been dreaming about it for weeks, about—about fixing it, now that I can finally tell you what you need to hear, which is that I want you, I want everything. I’m, you know, full steam ahead, so stop fucking chugging away from me. There’s icebergs and shit.”

Shane cocks his head at that, but he doesn’t ask.

“Just drop your anchor already, dude,” Ryan says. “Send me your coordinates and let me meet you there.” 

“So that’s a—is this a boat metaphor?”

“Yeah, you were a boat, and I was another boat, and it was dark, it was night, and we were passing but we couldn’t see—shut up. You know what I’m trying to say.”

Shane’s mouth twitches, almost a smile. “Yeah, but if you wanted to say it again, in English this time, I wouldn’t hate it.”

“I _love_ you, okay,” Ryan says, letting his voice crack pitifully all over it, letting every last wobble and weakness bleed through so Shane can hear them and know that if he is in peril on the sea, at least he’s no longer alone.

He can see Shane turning it over and over in his hands and in his head, weighing it, deciding whether he can allow himself to believe it. Whether, even if he can believe it, he can allow himself to keep it. _Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, shame on you; fool me thrice—_Ryan doesn’t know how that idiom finishes.

Shane stands up then, pushing his chair out from his desk with a harsh scrape against the floor. Ryan thinks, for one fear-filled moment, that Shane is going to leave, that he’s going to walk out the door and maybe even follow through on his threat to disappear.

Instead he comes around to Ryan’s side of the table. Ryan stands up to meet him hastily, unsure whether there’s going to be another fight, just knowing he wants to look Shane in the eye as best he can, whatever happens.

“I can’t believe,” Shane says fiercely, “I cannot _believe_ that after four years of telling true crime stories on the internet the first disappearance that popped into your stupid beautiful head was the _Lindbergh baby_.”

“Sor—” Ryan starts to say, but he does not get a chance to finish.

He doesn’t get the chance because Shane is crowding him against the desk and grasping his face with both hands, smooth palms on stubble, the span of them so big Ryan feels dwarfed by them. 

Shane bends to kiss him, and Ryan goes up on his tiptoes, and finally, _finally_ their intentions meet along with their mouths.

Shane’s still pressing in, and Ryan goes back until there’s no more back to go, and then he goes _up_, hopping onto the table and letting his legs fall open for Shane to step between. It puts their mouths a little closer to even and their bodies flush, so Shane doesn’t have to hunch so much, so Ryan doesn’t have to crane his neck.

_Easy as pie_, Ryan thinks.

As if he’s reading Ryan’s mind, Shane takes it easy, plays it cool. His mouth is soft, like he’s finally realized Ryan isn’t going anywhere. This can be one kiss of many, so it doesn’t have to say everything.

Shane’s so close, but Ryan wants him closer. He wraps his legs around Shane’s body, hooking his ankles into the meat of his thighs and tugging him in. Shane groans into his mouth, leaning in so hard it forces Ryan to lean the other way, arching his back, hands behind him for support.

“Oh no,” Shane breaks the kiss off to say. “We did it again.”

He gestures to their mics, to the podcast recording equipment. All of it on, all of it rolling.

“God damn it,” Ryan says, laughing even as he gasps for breath.

“Lovestruck Idiot’s going to get more than he bargained for, advice-wise.”

“Oh, yeah, we’re definitely making Steven edit this one. Sorry, Steve.”

“I’m not,” Shane says, kissing Ryan again. “I’m not sorry. Come home with me and let me show you how not sorry I am.”

He steps back, giving Ryan room to hop off the desk.

“He means we’re going to bonetown, Steven,” he tells the recorder, a little message in a bottle. “Put that in your meddling-ass pipe and smoke it.”

*

They take it easy back at Shane’s, too. Easy, easy, easy as. 

They order a pizza and they eat it, along with the salad Shane insists on making because he doubts Ryan eats green vegetables. They watch half a movie and make out lazily on the couch for the other half. Ryan leans against the kitchen counter while Shane does some dishes, offering commentary on the quality of the washing and getting soapy water flicked in his face for his trouble.

“Bonetown,” Shane says, drying his hands on the dish towel tossed over his shoulder. “What is—what does that mean?”

“I told you, I want it all,” Ryan says, and he can feel his face heating up, but he won’t give into it. The shitty weaselly teenager inside him can shut the fuck up and sit down for once. “Not tonight, though, if that’s okay. I’m not—there’s no rush, right?”

He doesn’t know how to explain it, but tonight he wants to de-escalate, to pump the breaks slowly and deliberately. As much it was about one-upping before, about competition, Ryan wants it to be different now. No gambits, no artifice.

He wants, quite honestly, his do-over. He wants to go back to the start.

Maybe Shane’s right there with him, because his face relaxes into half a smile. “Sounds good to me.”

So when they go to bed, they do that slow, too. They brush their teeth side-by-side, eyes meeting in the water-spotted bathroom mirror, grinning around toothbrushes. Ryan strips down to his boxer briefs, pulling off his pants and his t-shirt while Shane’s frank appreciation casts warmth all down his back.

In bed, the lights off, they turn to each other. It’s like that night, like his memory—Shane’s face silhouetted by only a little moonlight, sleepy and earnest.

“What’ll it be, sailor?” he asks.

Ryan takes Shane’s hand and presses it to the front of his underwear, and sees Shane’s eyes go soft and knowing as he gets it, his pupils so dilated they make his eyes impossibly dark.

“Yeah, I can do that,” he says even as he’s stroking Ryan through the fabric, getting him hard with a featherlight touch. Ryan watches his face this time, desperate not to miss a single micro-expression or cue.

He goes to reach for his bedside drawer—the lube, probably—and Ryan reaches out for him. “No,” he says. “Don’t need it.”

Shane slips his hand in Ryan’s underwear then, and he grins into Ryan’s bare shoulder when his hand encounters wetness at the tip and spreads it around. “You sure don’t.”

That hadn’t been what Ryan had meant. He’d just meant that he doesn’t want any distractions, any barriers, any muss or fuss. He only wants Shane’s hand on him and Shane’s eyes on him.

Shane starts to jerk him off in earnest then, and it’s exactly as Ryan remembers—the angle, the hugeness of Shane’s hand on him, getting him right there so fast it would be embarrassing if Ryan felt he had anything left to prove.

There is one thing in particular he’d like to change, one way he can improve upon his memory. He licks his own hand and slides it down between their bodies, navigating around Shane’s arm to untie his sweats and slide in.

“Christ,” Shane mutters when Ryan brushes his fingertips along his crown. He’s as hard as Ryan’s ever felt him, twitching the rest of the way into Ryan’s palm for Ryan to fit his hand around.

It should be awkward, both of them working in such a small space, knocking knees and elbows, but it isn’t. Shane tips his head back and back and back, nuzzling in close: stubble burn on Ryan’s neck, a deliberate graze of teeth against his Adam’s apple.

“I’m close,” Ryan warns, and Shane’s hand tightens around him, not making him wait. He makes that sound again, that happy hum, slack-mouthed into the joint of Ryan’s shoulder. It rockets Ryan right over the edge, coming into Shane’s palm where he’s wrapped it over the head to catch as much as he can.

It’s not hard to fend off the sleepiness this time, with Shane grinding into his hand and cutting off abortive little whimpers in his ear with each messy slide of his foreskin over the head of his cock.

Shane’s whole body curls into Ryan’s when he comes, bent at the waist, his ankle thrown over Ryan’s like they weren’t already touching enough places. Ryan sees his point, and he reaches out blindly for Shane’s wrist to tangle their hands together too.

Shane shudders as he comes down, laughing when his leg twitches involuntarily. He claps a hand over half his face, so he’s looking at Ryan with one eye and smiling with half his mouth.

“Well,” he says. “How ‘bout that?”

And yes, Ryan thinks, _yes_. This is how it was supposed to be all along. What a shame he missed the best parts of it before.

“How about it,” he agrees.

And there it is: the balance the universe was looking for all along. The thing that kept Ryan up at night, off-kilter and out of order, wondering what he was missing. Finally.

*

“Speaking of Steven, what was that thing he said when he left?” Shane asks later, after the cleanup but before sleep finds them. “Something about Illinois and, uh…?”

Ryan had sort of been hoping Shane hadn’t caught that. Surely, _surely_ there have been enough big feelings flying around for one day.

“That was Steven’s endgame,” he says. “For me. For this, I guess. When I told him about how things were getting a little out of control, uh, sexually. He meant it as a warning, but between you and me, I’m not sure it had the chilling effect he intended.”

Shane scratches his nose. Ryan thinks that might have been a bit much after the day they’ve had—too much, too soon, an overcompensation for being late to the party—and he regrets his big mouth.

“You would freeze in Illinois, you know. You’d be a nightmare from September to April.”

“Probably,” Ryan says. “But I’m a nightmare here, too. Three hundred sixty five days a year, baby.”

Shane grins, his eyes shining. “True.”

Ryan tucks that one away, for a future voyage, maybe. For now, it’s enough to be anchored here together.

*

**Author's Note:**

> i published my first fic two years ago yesterday, and i just wanted to say a quick thanks to everyone for making my time in this fandom so wonderful. you're all incredibly lovely and ilu <3


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